Emmmmm not so sure Massimo, Ive seen it come from a DELL Reps mouth in a presentation in front of 40+ CIO's, imagine the multiples of resource below them that will have this information given to them.
Im going to wait until VMworld and see whether they have a demo on show, seeing is beleiving 
As a lot of companies seem to talk the talk but never walk it!
Dan
PS So glad ive had my 50KB of Fame on a news site
Dan
Well Dan this assumes that the Dell sales rep know what a BIOS is and how it works. Perhaps you are giving too much credit to the category... 
I have also heard someone mentioning as having "ESX on the motherboard" (as opposed to the BIOS). This is a very loos statement since, technically, you can even have a standard SAS hard drive "on the motherboard". This very same article for example speculate that you could see "An embedded version residing in memory" ......... Memory? Which memory? A disk could be "memory" ...... etc etc etc
In my opinion people are leveraging the situation to find the most effective/shocking "statements" ......... After all stating that a server has "the hypervisor in the firmware" is very cool ..... isn't it? It looks like those very high-end eneterpise proprietary boxes .......
Reality is that we are not quite there yet. Quite frankly I don't see how one would be able to put an hypervisor (specifically of the nature of ESX which is a relatively big beast even if you streap down it removing the Service Console etc etc) into a BIOS or a firmware. It has to be more of an on-board "disk" (whether it will be standard SAS/SCSI, solid state etc etc ... it's a detail).
I guess we will know more down the road.
Massimo.
Yep, I dont disagree with that. Im neutral (dont work for a vendor ) and open to what will emerge from this.
Techinically how can you even future proof and make a solution like this cost effective with things like new releases and patching adding to the size of complete ESX footprint.
Trial until proven guilty for me
I agree with Massimo. My guess (and it's just a guess!) is that you'll see something like open-e's[/url] "disk on module" that allows you to have an "ESX Appliance". This "puts ESX on the motherboard" and, if you want to stretch a little, you could consider this to be "ESX in non-volatile storage"
To be honest, there's nothing preventing someone from doing this today, with the current version of VI-3, other than the fact that there's still too much state information stored locally on an ESX box (but there are ways to work around that )
Conceptually, this is similar to the way that Virtual Iron handles their host machines: PXE boot to a central image. They're just chucking the boot image into a chip on the board.
Definitely an attractive concept for IT shops wanting to virtualize, but not wanting to worry about training people on Linux to manage the SC. Like it or not, VMware's largest penetration seems to be with Windows shops. My concern would be around security -- if it is an appliance, are there default passwords and accounts? What does that look like from a security and compliance perspective?
Having stateless hosts is pretty attractive, and VMware seems to have been going towards more of an appliance model with ESX.
NB: I also work for a vendor and would be interested in seeing a VM blade-appliance from HP. Mmmm... DR...
>However, it seems that the VMkernel would need to be directly accessible
>rather than having the CoS effectively proxy the connection.
This is an implementation detail and clearly getting rid of the COS is not just an "rm" of some files ....
As per maintaining a user database ..... clearly, as you have mentioned, that would be a step in the wrong direction ..... so I doubt that they will make it ....
This is already a bad practice today .... and in the future it will be even more so if we move towards stateless building blocks.
Massimo.
out of curiosity .... how much would these 8GB dimm modules cost in real life?
The risk here is that of buying a low cost apartment (yet with a big mortgage) and decide to furnish it with golden teapots ..........
It's easy to say that with 256GB memory dimms you can get to 256*16= 4TBytes of memory ...... but you have to pay for that ....
Massimo.