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Microsoft's hyper visor-based visualization technology will hit the streets in its final version some time this summer. Hyper-V, formerly known as Virginian, will be rolled into the Data Center and Enterprise Editions of Windows Server 2008.

Although much hyped, this is not Microsoft's first venture into visualization. Its Virtual Server product holds that distinction. Hyper-V, however, is its first product to use the same supervisor-based technology as market leader VMware and Citric with its open source Xe.

What is significant about Microsoft's move is that although hyper visor technology makes hardware-assisted visualization extremely efficient and servers visualized in this way suffer very little performance penalty, the market is relatively immature. VMware currently has the largest market share by far, but the percentage of servers actually virtual remains small.

"In the visualization space, there is still everything left to play for," said Barb Gold worm, president and chief analyst at Boulder, Colorado-based Focus Consulting. "If you look at the visualization market today, 75 percent of large companies have implemented some form of visualization, but probably only 10 percent to 15 percent of the servers in the world are visualized. So the market is only 10 percent saturated," she added.

This suggests that Microsoft has timed its entry into the serious visualization world just about right. Awareness of the benefits of visualization is high — thanks in no small part to the ongoing marketing efforts of VMware — but plenty of companies have yet to commit to the EMS-owned company.

So although there's little reason for enterprises that have chosen to go with VMware to switch to Microsoft's Hyper-V, those that have yet to embrace virtualization technology have every reason to consider Hyper-V — especially if it comes bundled with Windows Server 2008.