According to news coming out of The Financial, Cisco announced that on October 31, 2008, the company acquired an increased equity stake in the EMC owned virtualization giant, VMware.

Cisco will purchase 500,000 shares of VMware Class A common stock currently held by Intel Corporation for approximately $13.3M. Upon closing of the investment, Cisco will own approximately 1.7% percent of VMware's total outstanding common stock.

Cisco and VMware announced in September several joint initiatives in the data center virtualization market, with perhaps the most interesting being the launch of the The Cisco Nexus 1000V distributed virtual software switch.