For others, who make choices based more on technical merit than intangibles like market leadership, third-party support or the quality of the golf outings vendor reps take them on, it will become increasingly clear that VMware and its premium prices are facing withering competition not only from Microsoft, but also from Citrix and the half-dozen other major companies offering implementations of the open-source Xen hypervisor, often bundled and specially integrated with their own hardware.

Despite its protests that its flavor of vanilla is much better than everyone else's, VMware is aware of this, of course. That's one reason it's pushing products that are tangential to its virtual-data-center strategy, such as Fusion, its version of software designed to run Windows applications on the MacOS.

It's also why VMware is expanding its reseller channel program ââ¬â¬S always a sign the vendor is concerned about expanding its market into a customer base that is not only smaller than "enterprises of any size," but also tends to avoid leading-edge technology in favor of the hand-holding and custom services that a value-added reseller can supply.

Of course virtualization has become a commodity, in the same way that simple networking, multi-processor computing, and distributed grid- or cluster-computing models have become common to modern server farms.

No vendor has to advertise that its higher-end servers run multicore chips or come in two-way, four-way, six-, eight-, or twelve-way configurations. That used to differentiate high-end server makers from the others; it doesn't any more.

That means IT managers at "enterprises of any size," any real size, anyway, should be making their decisions on virtualization products based on things other than the virtualization itself. How good is the SMP support? The RAS? The failover and disaster recovery? Built-in business continuity? Built-in or bundled management capability? Troubleshooting and security?

VMware has a pretty decent lineup in most of those areas, as well. But when Dell is selling your basic capability by mail-order (without really mentioning that it's your hypervisor its customers are most often buying) it's time to realize your big differentiator has gone completely away and you need to focus on something else. Because your customers already have.

Veteran journalist Kevin Fogarty has covered the technology and business worlds for more than 18 years. Fogarty is a former editor or analyst at Computerworld, Baseline, eWeek, and Illuminata. Fogarty won an ASBPE (American Society of Business Publication Editors) award for column-writing during his stint at Computerworld.