Is VMware planning to support Hyper-V and Xen?

William Lam, who runs the virtualGhetto blog has discovered more than 1200 undocumented VMware .vmx parameters. Using UNIX/Linux utility strings Lam discovered the parameters in the /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx binary which is used to load a VM configuration file.

Based on the contents he discovered Lam makes the following speculations:

• VMware vSphere is going to support virtual Hypervisors, specifically Microsoft and Xen.

• vSphere is going to support Mac OSX, by providing EFI Support and support for Darwin as guest OS.

"…vSphere is hypervisor aware?

%s: %s detected by CPUID

%s: VMware detected

Microsoft Hyper-V

%s: Xen detected by hypercall

Xen detected but hypervisor unrecognized (Xen variant?)

I noticed the following strings around detecting certain guest hypervisors, is this a hint that VMware is going to support other virtual "hypervisors", specifically Microsoft and Xen?…"

If these features will actually make it into a released version of VMware vSphere can’t be said. But VMware is exploring the possibilities, that’s for sure.

http://virtualization.info/en/news/2010/11/is-vmware-planning-to-support-hyper-v-and-xen.html