VMWorld Day 2 News Roundup

OVF - The New Prescription for Hypervisor Interoperability Pain: A good summary of the Open Machine Virtual Format announced Tuesday, why it matters and how it may impact the industry, from Chris Wolf at The Burton Group's Data Center Decisions blog.

Open Virtual Machine Tools: The VMTN blog offers additional links (including the SourceForge download site) and some reaction/perspective from the open source community.

ESX 3i: Mike Laverick from RTFM Education looks at the market niche for the pre-installed version of ESX server: "It became clear that this is being pitched at customers who find ESX and its deployment a scary prospect."

Virtualization.info: Alessandro Perilli on the Chambers keynote: "This has been a very unfocused and disappointing keynote, without new announcements and for sure not the expected virtual switches (which doesn't mean it will not happen)."

Scott Lowe has a similar reaction, calling the Cisco keynote "remarkable for the absence of what most people expected from the keynote: the announcement that Cisco would be shipping third-party switches on ESX Server."

Cisco's Ullal Describes Data Center Vision: eWeek Senior Editor Paula Musich interviews Jayshree Ullal, Cisco's senior vice president of data center, on Cisco's challenge in the data center space. It's a pretty lively give-and-take.

Cisco and VMware Buddy Up: Big-picture coverage from The Register.

"We'll Be Technically Better Than Microsoft": VMware co-founder Mendel Rosenblum is Thursday's keynoter, but gave an advance interview to Charles Babcock at InformationWeek, who explores embedded ESX and VMware's competitive dynamic with Microsoft.