"It really changes the certification game," Crosby said. "Are you going to tell HP you don't support their hardware?"

The Xen platform has also become the platform of choice for anyone -- including Sun, Red Hat, Oracle and Novell -- that want to be virtualization vendors.

The only company to incur Crosby's wrath is Oracle. The company has chosen a closed approach to virtualization, with its own version of Xen. Oracle only allows its own virtualization technology to be used with its applications, Crosby said, which is "silly."

Crosby wants the rest of the companies innovating with Xen to become to be successful as well. In the end, he is convinced virtualization hasn't found its final form yet.

"The Xen ecosystem hasn't really hit the market hard yet, but it will soon," Crosby said. "VMware is the most mature platform, but we are close behind."

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