David Marshall in his InfoWorld “Virtualization Report” blog writes: “Despite a sharp slowdown in U.S. business software spending, an April 2008 survey report from ChangeWave Research shows that virtualization may be spared as virtualization software spending has increased.” Marshall continues: “The fact is, a troubled economy is probably yet another reason why virtualization software sales continue to grow. Virtualization is a technology that helps a company reduce its datacenter costs, such as less spending on server hardware, server maintenance, datacenter space, power, and cooling. So it makes sense for companies to continue to spend IT budget on virtualization software during troubling economic times.”

Same story on this blog - “Virtualization Demand Heats Up This Summer”. Zach Church writes: “Midmarket CIOs can expect to see a lot of action this summer in the virtualization market, as major vendors introduce new products and competition heats up.”

The questions in my mind after the long Memorial Day weekend are: What are the reasons behind the virtualization mania? Is virtualization the biggest hype in software or are there serious and legitimate reasons why virtualization is the hot topic of the upcoming summer? I am really curious.