Given Microsoft's recent decision to play catch-up, it was tempting to ask our experts what chance/role they see for Open Source tools for virtualization management?

Epstein (VP of Marketing for Scalent Systems) is optimistic: "Open Source is always an alternative in any industry, and the virtual management (and physical management) market is wide open. I suspect open source will take a commensurate share to what it has taken in other application / OS areas."

Hamilton (COO of Trigence) is equally convinced that proprietary or non-proprietary, virtualization solutions will shine. "The opportunity lies in those who understand the power of virtualization is in its adaptability," he says, adding: "The hypervisor is secondary."

"Whether you're using VMware, Xen, KVM, OpenVZ or Qemu won't matter. It's how you manage & grow your virtual environment that will be important," says Hamilton.

When I asked Kevin Epstein what trend our discussions had overlooked he was quick to react. There is indeed one burning question, in his view:

"Who's bridging the connectivity divide? Data centers will run physical and virtual machines, on multiple platforms, cross-connected to different networks and storage, shifting in real-time. Who's managing 'infrastructure virtualization,' beyond CPU virtualization."

Let's give the final word though to Enomaly's Reuven Cohen, who leaves us with the thought that computing is currently going through a paradigm shift in which computing is moved away from personal computers or an individual application server to a "cloud" of computers. As such, he isn't convinced that 2008 will be the year of Virtualization; he has another candidate:

"2008 will be the year of the Cloud. Those who embrace automated deployment and scaling of their infrastructure will succeed. Look to Amazon.com and their AWS services as a hint of the opportunities coming to virtual infrastructure."