Thanks for your comment, with which I agree. Actually I meant to highlight the “application level abstraction” required for shared stack multitenancy and accociated resource elasticity, not the infrastructure virtualization that is already available from VMware.

I’m not sure I agree entirely with one of your points:
“in both cases this applies rather to newly developed applications – existing applications need to be redesigned in order to take advantage of the virtualization and resource abstraction features”

VMware’s approach to virtualization and cloud computing is based on vSphere which already does a great job enabling applications running within enterprises to benefit from virtualization and resource abstraction. VMware’s vMotion, HA, vStorage, and vShield Zones are used for a variety of app workloads today with minimal changes required to the actual apps.

The vCloud initiative builds on vSphere and looking through the info on their website, portability across internal and external cloud platforms appears pretty important.

Full disclosure: I work at SpringSource and can only comment so much on this topic until the VMware acquisition closes, but I figured I’d chime in.

Thanks again for the post.