Fortunately for virtualization customers, though not for the vendors, the second way to interpret the latest wave of virtualization-tagged product announcements is a lot more useful:

It's not that vendors are piling on the bandwagon, it's that the bandwagon is growing large enough that they have no choice but to jump on.

That's good because there will be a lot more management, security and other secondary products available in the near term than there would be if virtualization remained a niche function, or if the technology remained so esoteric that add-on products really did have to be customized and tweaked to support virtualization as they did to support clustering, grid computing, broadband and wireless networking and other leaps forward.

Virtualization, as I am far from the only one to point out, has become a commodity function, or is rapidly becoming one. That doesn't mean that high-performing virtualization software has no value above that of more basic approaches. It means that every time a company of any size (which usually mean biggish companies, but in virtualization is quickly coming to mean companies of any size) is either installing virtualization software, or plans to do so.

Yankee Groups's latest report on the virulence and spread of virtualization estimates that 75 per cent of end user companies are either moving forward or are preparing to move forward with virtualization installs.

That's not a fad. It's not even a movement. It's the dominant approach to server-farm management.

It doesn't mean every server purchase involves virtualization products, or even that every server purchase will spark a discussion about virtualization.

It does mean that any vendor selling anything designed to operate inside a data center, connect to a data center, or allow the words "data center" to pass through its data bus at any point during its lifecycle had better have a response when customers ask "how's this going to work with my virtualization setup?"

They'd better have a good answer even if the customer doesn't know what that virtualization setup will be. Virtualization is so much an assumption on the part of customers that it is no longer the responsibility of the customer to explain that project ABC involves some virtualized elements.

It's up to vendors pitching for that business, consultants designing the software or infrastructure and anyone else involved to assume there will be some storage or server virtualization involved and take that into account, rather than pitching a non-VM-capable plan as representing their basic expectations and offering a VM-able version for an additional cost.