Last Friday, Intel hosted a launch event at San Francisco's Palace Hotel for the upgrade of its vPro technologies (virtualisation, security and remote administration): a platform for business desktop PCs that includes a CPU, a chipset, a firmware, and a gigabit network interface (NIC). The first iteration of vPro launched last Fall and already enabled IT administrator to remotely managed PCs, even when turned off, and install patchesbug fixes, etc. br With vPro 2007, Intel added: br br - the Trusted eXecution Technology (TXT) that insures the integrity of virtual machine monitors e.g. VMWare, Parallels, XenSource...; br br - improved system defense filters that now has a firewall type of functionality (deep packet inspection, screening for malicious behaviour...) for the integrated Gigabit NIC; br br - a capability to allow a PC that does not have its OS active, because it's turned off, to securely come on to an IEEE 802.1x or a Cisco NAC network; br br - support for DASH and WS-Man management standards; br br - virtualisation for Directed IO which prevents unauthorised access to the hardware. br But here's the catch. If you are running a Virtual Appliance on a vPro system, you will not be able to run another virtual machine monitor (VMM)hypervisor from VMWare, Parallels, XenSourceCitrix or any others. And that is because you can only run *one* VMM at a time on a PC. So you will have to choose between running the lightweight VMM that comes with the Virtual Appliance (from Lenovo, Symantec...) and only traps network traffic or a multi-purpose one. And that for me is an serious limitation because I want to be able to have both: a VMM to load several OSespartitions on my PC and have the monitoringsecurity features of a Virtual Appliance. "There's technology to allow multiple virtual appliances [...] but that's a problem I need to solve later", said Mike Ferron-Jones, an Intel marketing director (pictured). br br Now that could be easily solved if I use VMWare's virtual appliances that would work on VMWare's hypervisor. ...