Looks like VMware is moving for an IPO. As the virtualization market approaches full maturity, things certainly look set to move very quickly indeed in the next few years. Basically, the three major players at the moment are VMware itself, Microsoft’s Virtual Server, and the open-sourced Xen.

Essentially, just about all the major OS vendors have already made known their strategies pertaining to VM technology, with Xen being a favorite despite its (compared to the others) less mature engine. But with the serious money being poured in - the likes of Redhat and Novell, that will probably not be true very much longer. Branching off from this main tier, we have the 2nd layer tier of players on the burgeoning VM market such as Virtual Iron Software and PlateSpin. Generally, they tend to focus more on the niche of addressing the unique issues that enterprise-level consolidation and management of VMs brings about.

Additionally, niches are being carved left and right by formidable heavyweights like Citrix and SWsoft. In fact, Citrix has just announced their Citrix Desktop Server, in which front-end thin clients meet back-end VM-hosted environment. SWsoft, which separately developed their technology of OS-level virtualization, and one of the main players within the web hosting industry, has now added Windows virtualization to its portfolio.

Indeed, both Intel and AMD have already moved to provide hooks that giving direct hardware acceleration of virtual machines on the processor itself in current and upcoming iterations of their chips.

Anyway, it is worth noting that VMware will be offering only 10% of its Class A Common Stock in the IPO. It does seem to confirm suspicion that it is really preparing its war-chest for the VM-war(s) ahead rather than a plain cashing in on the bottom-line.

You can read the press release here.

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