MacOS X Leopard to include VMWare-like virtualisation software? [www.macosxrumors.com]

Now this is an interesting rumour. It makes a lot of sense to me. Apple has been quietly building market share and making quite a lot of money in the server and storage hardware markets.

If Apple could ship an XServe + XSan combo that out of the box ran efficient virtualized MacOS X, Windows, Linux, Solaris, etc. boxes it would be a real seller and make Apple a serious name in the business market.

It also opens the way to make money in the Windows market without having to beat windows. Imagine a small business who need an email server and web server. They really want to use Exchange (kindof like how children always want to grab boiling hot pans off the stove) but they've heard that Unix based web servers are better. They buy and install an XServe from Apple, ideally with both OS's pre-installed (yeah, like MS will license that...) and they get the best of both worlds. Then when spam get's too much for them they hire a consultant (me :) to configure spamassasin on another un*x virtual machine to pre-filter their inbound internet email before it gets to the MS Exchange virtual machine.

Makes sense to me.