"It is still early for this important technology," wrote Bob Muglia, senior vice president of Microsoft's Server and Tools Business, in an executive memo to Microsoft customers yesterday. "Ultimately," he added, "virtualization will play an important role in improving business agility by making IT systems more flexible and more responsive to changing business needs."

Muglia pointed out the enormous growth potential of virtualization. Currently, industry analysts estimate that fewer than 10 percent of servers are virtualized, despite the fact that virtualization has been around for many years.

"But its significance is growing as companies have introduced products that target today's high-volume, low-cost hardware," he noted. "Now, more and more companies are using server virtualization to save money by consolidating the workload of several servers onto a single machine."

He continued:

"At Microsoft, we believe that in the coming years, sever virtualization will become ubiquitous. Adoption of other forms of virtualization is just beginning, too, and their potential value remains largely untapped."

Already, according to Muglia's memo, virtualization products from Microsoft and its partners "are helping companies match computing capabilities to business needs."

He draws a picture of the future:

"Imagine, for example, if your employees could access their personalized desktop, with all of their settings and preferences intact, on any machine, from any location. Or if workloads running on the servers in your data center automatically redeployed to respond to a sudden surge in demand for a specific capability.

Or if your entire infrastructure could restore itself instantly following a catastrophic power outage.Today, using existing Microsoft technologies, these Dynamic IT scenarios are already possible. Tomorrow, they will be the norm as we continue to bring new innovations in virtualization and systems management to market that help companies build truly dynamic infrastructures, from the server to the desktop."

All in all, Muglia's "Dynamic IT" vision, first detailed at Tech•Ed 2007 last June in Orlando, Florida, has never been more virtualization-centric than in yesterday's memo.

• Microsoft's Greschler Keynotes SYS-CON's "Virtualization Conference & Expo"
• Microsoft Out to Bloody VMware & Leave Scars