If I were Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel, I'd be wearing my black baseball hat and yellow slicker and telling you to prepare for the deluge. The amount of virtualization news and marketing bravado being slung this week and next will be hurricane strength. Microsoft launched its virtualization strategy formally yesterday, talking tough about price. VMware's VMworld event begins next week. And Citrix, Sun, Oracle and a supporting cast of third-party companies will be joining in too. So let's cut through some of the hype so far, then talk about what we really want to see happen at VMworld.

First, Microsoft keeps pushing the message that its virtualization technology will cost IT shops a lot less than VMware's in the long run. The newest salvo yesterday was the announcement of a free version of Hyper-V server, software which can of course be loaded onto OEM boxes going out the doors of major server vendors. (Keep in mind, Microsoft has already said you'll get a free version of Hyper-V server with Windows Server 2008 data center edition.) VMware already offers a free version of its server virtualization technology, ESXi. This is a counter-move on Microsoft's part.

Now, says Chris Wolf, senior analyst with the Burton Group, look at what Microsoft's free server virtualization option is missing: a way to make it work as part of a high-availability solution in a cluster. "If I'm using a hypervisor in production," Wolf says, "I'm going to deploy it as a cluster to avoid a single point of failure." This is a big drawback for Microsoft's free version, he says.

In Microsoft's favor, its management product should be ready within 30 days, filling a gap that has been quite real until now it its chase of VMware.

But there's this funny thing about IT veterans, especially CIOs: They are quite conservative about change. Those who already know and love VMware are going to have a hard time getting their heads around dumping much of what they've already invested in staff expertise and process around VMware. Microsoft may want to steer the virtualization conversation to price, but that price had better be radically different, because slightly different won't cut it with most IT shops.

Microsoft is also trying to talk up that IT shops want one shoulder to lean on, and it might as well be Microsoft if you are a big Windows Server shop. This is a classic IT question: Do you go with one vendor or best of breed? Psst: With free, downloadable hypervisors from VMware, Sun and Xen available, anyone who thinks numerous hypervisors aren't being used in their enterprise right now is wrong. There will be room for several hypervisors in most enterprises.