But VMware accomplished much more than the release of View last week. It also announced the acquisition of Tungsten Graphics (actually, this was announced on Monday, December 15), a company offering desktop graphics acceleration. In its discussion of the acquisition, virtualization.info posited that the company was bought to incorporate its technology into the desktop checkin/checkout functionality described above. A common issue with desktop virtualization is that the abstraction from hardware diminshes graphics performance, so Tungsten's functionality might ameliorate this issue. It's early days, but graphics performance is something that needs to be addressed for desktop-based virtualization to be widely adopted.

Finally, and interestingly, VMware released a set of management APIs for its ESXi (i.e., free) hypervisor. Heretofore, the APIs were only available via a vCenter passthrough arrangement. Certainly, that was unattractive for a free offering, but, more important, it governed the innovation that could be brought to bear on the product. Now, with a set of direct APIs available, new management products can be created, including, possibly, one or more open source ones. Certainly, the record of innovation by open source development offers the potential for some very interesting management options for ESXi. Supposedly, CIM agents for ESXi are also available, making it possible to manage the product from any CIM-compliant management infrastructure (CIM is a standard from the DMTF designed to ease management interoperability). However, in poking around and researching this, I came across a posting that said the APIs would be locked down in the next release of ESXi, so perhaps this availability was a mistake, not an initiative. It's always hard to put the horse back in the barn, though, so it may be hard for VMware to back away from the API availability in the future. We'll see.

All in all, an interesting week. The world of virtualization keeps heating up. Competition in the market continues to pay end user benefits, with more to come.

Bernard Golden is CEO of consulting firm HyperStratus, which specializes in virtualization, cloud computing and related issues. He is also the author of "Virtualization for Dummies," the best-selling book on virtualization to date.