Demo of the vCloud initiative from VMWorld 2008

I was also in the audience, and was reasonably impressed with the demo -- although VMware was pretty tight-lipped regarding when it would be productized ("sometime in 2009" booth personnel kept telling me).

The only limitation on the demo that I could tell were that the resource being "reached-out" to had to have a VMware host pre-installed.

Besides VMware/Beehive, there are other firms doing this and more. Cassatt for example, has been shipping a product that can reach out to an arbitrary "pool" of bare-metal resources and create a virtual host on-the-fly (or another physical machine, for that matter).  My take on the demo you  linked to is on my blog.  http://fountnhead.blogspot.com/2008/09/postcards-from-vmworld-2008.html

hey Ken

sorry we missed each other on the conference floor.  I stopped by to get the Cassatt perspective on this, but like most there I was going a million miles a minute. 

Thanks for your feedback and input to this demo and I agree that there are others out there doing the same things.

Let's talk soon

Cheers
Michael