Intel has published the first details about its forthcoming Vanderpool technology for hardware virtualisation on forthcoming desktop and server chips. This type of virtualisation enables a single computer to run multiple operating systems.

Interest in virtualisation is growing because the business case for it is so compelling. Computer hardware is now so powerful that one operating system and one application rarely consume more than a few percent of the available system resources. Virtualisation enables firms to make more efficient use of their server hardware. For example, an IT manager recently told us his company now has 65 virtual servers running on a single eight-way server.

As well issuing some technical documentation that will be of interest to software developers, Intel has brought forward the delivery dates for this technology from 2006 to some time later this year.

The chip giant has said that it will begin by adding Vanderpool to its desktop chips and the 64bit Itanium chip. As with the introduction of other major technologies from Intel, the mainstream Xeon server chips will get the new features only when they have proved themselves in those other systems, the company said.

Analysts predict that by 2010, 95 percent of all new Wintel server deployments will be based on virtualised hardware.

Vanderpool will add new instructions to Intel's chips to improve support for hardware virtualisation; and a software element called a virtual machine monitor (VMM) to manage virtual machines as they are loaded and used on a day-to-day basis.

Virtualisation specialist VMware and Microsoft both already sell virtualisation products for use with x86 chips, and they work well without special instructions in the chips. These products each include a proprietary VMM that either runs alongside a standard operating system, or in the case of VMware's high-end ESX Server, directly on the server hardware, beyond the control of any guest operating systems.

VMware chief technology officer Ed Bugnion said Vanderpool will reduce the performance overhead of virtualisation, compared with previous virtualisation systems. "It underscores how ubiquitous this stuff is going to be. But Intel is not going to have [management apps] like VMware's ControlCenter or features like VMotion and dynamic resource management," he added.

However, analysts warn of potential problems with software licensing schemes. Currently the price charged by some vendors depends on the number of processors present in the server, rather than on how many are allocated to the software in question. In future, virtualisation technologies could enable fractions of a processor to be allocated to an application, so rather than running on one processor, an operating system and its applications might be set to run on 25 percent of one processor. It seems very likely that buyers will look to software vendors to update their pricing schemes to reflect this.