Over the last few days there has been a lot of attention directed at our counterparts at XenSource. This week at Citrix iForum, the largest application delivery conference in the world, Citrix announced an agreement with the two largest x86 server vendors on the market, HP and Dell. The number one and number two x86 server vendors respectively will be offering Citrix XenServer embedded in the HP Proliant and BladeSystem servers and Dell PowerEdge servers.

What does this mean for virtualization?

The embedded hypervisor approach from Citrix and VMWare (and eventually Microsoft) will help accelerate the mass adoption of virtualization because these vendors will be making it much easier for midsized and smaller companies to get turnkey virtual servers. By providing their customers with turnkey, virtualization solutions, HP and Dell will help their customers reduce their overall costs of deploying virtual servers. And by offering a choice of hypervisors, they will be giving their customers options, something that was limited before.

We have seen the predictions for the future of virtualization, and we have heard analysts predict that by 2009 at least 50% of x86 servers will be shipped with an embedded virtualization platform. Although these are only predictions, what’s to say that these figures aren’t a bit conservative? Either way we are eagerly awaiting widespread adoption.