One VMware user testing VDC-OS is Doug Babb, the chief IT systems architect at Hill Air Force Base just south of Ogden, Utah. Babb has been involved in a multiyear project that has so far trimmed six data centers into two and has relied heavily on virtualization and x86 for its 22,000 users.

The U.S. Air Force base several years ago began to move away from Unix-based systems, x86 hardware running VMware's ESX using Red Hat Linux and Oracle. Babb will outline his IT project at one of VMworld's conference sessions.

In the next couple of years, Babb, a contractor for Systems Implementers Inc. in Tucson, Ariz., eventually hopes to reduce the data center to several containers, or a "data center in a box," that are virtual and lights-out, meaning few people are needed to run them. It is one of the reasons he has VDC-OS running on some test servers.

"We need to get much closer to a lights-out data center and to something that we can expand and shrink quickly, depending on demand," said Babb.

Charles King, an analyst at Pund-IT Inc. in Hayward, Calif., said VMware's approach will raise interesting questions for hardware vendors, in particular, about its long-term effect on their products. If all x86 systems are treated as virtual pools, the underlying hardware may be of less consequence, he said.

One of the sharpest divides in hardware are fault-tolerant systems, a market that VMware will attempt to shake up with its fault-tolerant software technology, due next year.

Fault-tolerant servers are systems that can built to triple redundancy, which means the server has three of everything—three CPUs, for instance, or three disks—all running in tandem. If one piece of hardware breaks, the other components take over, and the service never fails. Major users include financial services, telecommunications, emergency services and air-traffic systems.

VMware will release a product next year that it claimed will provide, through virtualization software, virtual machines running in tandem on separate servers, with the same level of data protection as hardware-based systems. Even if traditional fault-tolerant users buck VMware's approach, it presumably will cost less than hardware-based systems that may have appeal with software-as-a-service providers seeking enterprise clients.

Although Microsoft, Citrix, Sun and a host of other virtualization vendors will be vying for customer attention at this conference, VMware has the lion's share of the x86 virtualization market and technology lead, analysts agreed. Perhaps because of that, VMware's management tools in development aren't being designed to also manage Microsoft Corp.'s Hyper-V, for instance.