Dell, IBM, HP, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, and NEC all said they are committed to producing servers with VMware's ESX Server hypervisor pre-installed.

Mark Jarvis, former Oracle chief marketer and Dell's chief marketing officer since April, joined Greene on stage Tuesday morning in San Francisco to illustrate how virtualization can be embedded in a server. The simplest way is to add a flash memory device to the motherboard of the server. The device holds a stripped down, 32-megabyte version of ESX Server called ESX Server 3i, announced Monday.

Jarvis and Greene turned on a new AMD quad-core Barcelona chip server from Dell, showing ESX 3i loading automatically. Using the VMware Infrastructure 3 client screen that was displayed, Greene clicked on an image of a virtual machine stored on a nearby networked disk array and activated it.

"We think this is a really big deal, up and running with virtualization in two minutes," said Jarvis.

Michael Dell, CEO of Dell, said in a recorded video that Dell plans to ship virtualized servers by the end of November. "Virtualization really does simplify IT," he said.

VMware's and the hardware manufacturer's view that virtualization can be made a feature of the hardware is at variance with Microsoft's plans to offer virtualization as a feature of the operating system. Microsoft's upcoming Windows Server 2008 is due next February, with the Viridian hypervisor to be added within six months.

IBM senior VP Bill Zeitler said in a recorded video that IBM will ship its xSeries x3950 in the fourth quarter with quad-core, Intel processors running VMware's embedded hypervisor. HP's senior VP James Mouton, Fujitsu Siemens Computers' chief marketing officer Barbara Schadler, and NEC senior VP Yohikazu Maruyama all appeared in recorded videos citing their plans to ship x86 servers with ESX 3i embedded in them.

The shift by the hardware makers to embed virtualization illustrates how far virtualization of the data center has come in a year's time. At VMware's annual user group meeting last year in Los Angeles, spokesmen on stage debated when virtualization would cease to be a specialized niche and enter the mainstream. That debate appears to be over with virtualization's adoption by the hardware manufacturers.