Virtualisation is set to get big. The ability to run virtual machines within a host operating system is an ability that we have as yet only begun to tap into, and with future processors from AMD and Intel gaining extra instructions to help with virtualisation performance, the technology will no doubt become more and more important, even ultimately to regular desktop users.

Virtualisation industry leaders VMware have announced a new product bundle that the company believes will help them extend their lead in this market. They have announced VMware Infrastructure 3, a new software suite that combines VMware's ESX Server product with VirtualCenter management tools, VMFS distributed file system software, the company's Distributed Resource Scheduler, and its High Availability and Consolidated Backup tools.

This suite differs from previous offerings from VMware in that in the past, a customer created a virtual machine and targeted it at one piece of hardware, but now it is possible to aggregate all of your hardware into one pool and then map applications to those hardware resources. Rival offerings from Microsoft and XenSource can't even come close to this.