Last Friday, Intel hosted a launch event at San Francisco's Palace Hotel for the upgrade, code named "Waybridge", of its vPro technologies (virtualisation, security and remote administration): a platform for business desktop PCs that includes a CPU, a chipset, a firmware, and a gigabit network interface (NIC). The first iteration of vPro launched last Fall and already enabled IT administrator to remotely managed PCs, even when turned off, and install patches/bug fixes, etc.

With vPro 2007, Intel added:

- the Trusted eXecution Technology (TXT) that insures the integrity of virtual machine monitors e.g. VMWare, Parallels, XenSource...;

- improved system defense filters that now has a firewall type of functionality (deep packet inspection, screening for malicious behaviour...) for the integrated Gigabit NIC;

- a capability to allow a PC that does not have its OS active, because it's turned off, to securely come on to an IEEE 802.1x or a Cisco NAC network;

- support for DASH and WS-Man management standards;

- virtualisation for Directed I/O preventing unauthorised access to the hardware.

But here's the catch. If you are running a Virtual Appliance on a vPro system, you will not be able to run another virtual machine monitor (VMM)/hypervisor from VMWare, Parallels, XenSource/Citrix, Red Hat's Virtual Appliance OS or any others. And that is because you can only run *one* VMM at a time on a PC. So you will have to choose between running the lightweight VMM that comes with the Virtual Appliance (from Lenovo, Symantec...) and only traps network traffic or a multi-purpose one. And that for me is an serious limitation because I want to be able to have both: a VMM to load several OSes/partitions on my PC and have the monitoring/security features of a Virtual Appliance. "There's technology to allow multiple virtual appliances [...] but that's a problem I need to solve later", said Mike Ferron-Jones, an Intel marketing director (pictured).

Now that could be easily solved if I use VMWare's virtual appliances that would work on VMWare's hypervisor. But then, wouldn't that make Intel's virtual appliance, well... caduc?

So why is this important and why should you care? Well because the choice of a hypervisor is now so crucial due to the lack of interopability of virtual machine vendors (that might change but slowly)... So once you choose one VM vendor for all your PCs, you're locked in... no wonder VMWare's shares are going through the roof... it's becoming another Microsoft!!!!!!