The virtualization software wars got a little more physical this week.At its own VMworld 2004 conference, VMware announced its intent to ship its 4-Way VMware Virtual SMP product in the second half of this year, around the time it expects the first multi-core processors (bets are down that AMD beats Intel to the punch) to hit the market. The company has clearly established a lead over Microsoft with its recently shipped Virtual Server 2005, a product that only has support for uni-processor machines at this point. This sort of technology lead could mean significant bucks for VMware, owned by storage giant EMC, if various market forecasts prove accurate for over the next year or two. I guess you could say VMware wants to see virtualization, well, virtually everywhere.“We think that over the next 5 years a very high percentage of workloads are going to go into virtual machines. Even by the end of (2005) of all new OSes deployed on x86-based servers, between three and five per cent of them will go into VMware virtual machines. And that figure will only increase over time because the efficiency, flexibility, and security benefits of running virtual – along with the technologies we are bringing in to scale to faster I/O – will make virtualization ubiquitous,” said Michael Mullany, VMware’s vice president of marketing.Following up last month’s delivery of Virtual Server 2005, (which Microsoft is using to lure most corporate users off older Windows servers and over to Windows Server 2003) Microsoft tried to steal a little of VMware’s thunder. It announced this week a free version of its Virtual Server 2005 Migration Toolkit that can help simplify the process of migrating operating systems and its apps from a physical server to a virtual one. Microsoft appears to be applying some pricing pressure early in the virtual wars (shocking!) by not charging for the tool. VMware does charge for the competing P2V tool.– By Ed Scannell Technology Industry