Mitchell Ashley writes about Microsoft's vision for virtualization on the Network World blog - covering David Greshler's presentation during the 2007 Virtualization Conference and Expo.  If you haven't spoken with David Greshler before, you probably haven't witnessed his passion for virtualization.  He has great insight into the subject.  Mitchell Ashley writes:

At the 2007 Virtualization Conference & Expo David Greshler, co-founder of Softricity and marketing director for Microsoft System Center, described Microsoft's visions as diversity of virtualization. David's perspective is that virtualization is a lot more than just running virtual instances of operating systems on the same hardware. Virtualization happens at all levels; the OS, storage, networking and applications.

"What we see is virtualization across the board...Virtualization is the ability to compose all of those pieces on the fly... dynamically, in real-time, to give people what they need." Play video of David's presentation >>>

David is taking virtualization well beyond the data center, extending it on the desktop and applications. Essentially the whole software stack is virtualized, but not in one OS instance, rather it's at each level of software. Applications don't install themselves into the OS, they are virtualized and streamed in real time to the desktop. Even though the app may think it is installed into the OS, it really isn't - that installation has been virtualized. Two keys to doing this is; 1) identity, 2) policy based management, e.g., Active Directory. For your apps and data to follow you, both have to be in place in order for you to migrate between virtual desktops, and operating systems. David also stressed managing both the physical world (servers/machines) and the virtual world from one pane of glass. That's obvious since he's part of the Microsoft System Center product group.

Read the entire article, here.