With an unsurprising move VMware just announced a deal with four key motherboards and computers manufacturers (aka Original Design Manifacturers or ODM): ASUS, Gigabyte, IESC and Tyan.
These companies will release 2-way, 4-way and blade servers certified for ESX and ESXi.
Such kind of deals are likely to became more frequent in the coming months: VMware has to put its hypervisor on as many systems as possible to counter the fact that the entire industry will be Microsoft Hyper-V ready from day one. And the choice to include the driver model in the hypervisor kernel severely slows down the process.