DiPetrillo, who carries the title Specialist Systems Engineer-Competition and, apparently, responsibility for making sure the rest of the A/V club stays united behind VMware, spends most of his time making rude gestures at Microsoft, which spends most of its time ignoring everyone and just talking about itself.

Asaro does argue effectively that Microsoft has not only not taken over the virtualization market, but is barely present in it. He relies as evidence on the lack of Microsoft reps or partners actively competing for individual contracts with customers, though, which is misleading.

Of course there are few, if any, Microsoft teams out selling Hyper-V on a project-by-project basis; the code only shipped to manufacturers this month. Even if everyone weren't on vacation, it would take a while to get the meetings set up and the competition heated up.

Microsoft's virtualization products are pretty low-level (he means the hypervisor), while the bulk of even mid-sized customers are looking for advanced functions like disaster recovery, dynamic reprovisioning of virtual servers, and virtual-machine load balancing. Microsoft has none of those available, he says.

Except that it does. All that stuff is contained in the arsenal of systems management tools Microsoft either already sells or will release along with its Virtual Machine Manager, which is currently in beta testing.

Wait three to six months, Asaro says, and we'll see if Microsoft gains any traction with any customers other than those looking for the most basic functions.

Sounds like whistling past the graveyard to me; more than one well-established vendor has pooh-poohed Microsoft's chances of getting a toehold in a new market only to find itself knocked completely out of contention a year or two later.

Crosby has also spent a lot of energy talking about Citrix' range of virtual server products, while the company itself talks primarily about ways to expand its base of virtual-application and desktop-virtualization customers.

It wasn't nearly so aggressive before Hyper-V was on the verge of becoming a reality and Citrix execs realized they'd have to do more than just rely on their alliance with Microsoft to hold their position.

The increasingly bitter and personal rhetoric is more than just entertainment for those of us who follow it. It's an indication of the increasing anxiety of the vendors in the market and the increasing potential for panicky behavior.

I doubt we'll see fisticuffs between trade-show booths (entertaining as that would be.) But we might see ill-advised acquisitions, alliances, discounts and special deals as the first-tier vendors (Microsoft and VMware) fight for dominance and the second tier fight for position.