Over the last few months the speculations around Cisco entering the server virtualization market were supported just by rumors. Below a list of news related to the topic:

• March 2008 - Cisco puts KVM in its IOS (the company denied that this ever happened)
• April 2008 - Cisco or IBM may acquire Citrix
• June 2008 - Cisco doesn’t want to buy VMware
• July 2008 - Cisco may be interested in hypervisors more than what it seems

Rumors or not, today something concrete happened: Cisco signed as member of the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program.

The program simplifies the relationship between Microsoft and the other members so that the software giant can easily support its products on participants’ hypervisors:

The Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP) is open to any vendor who delivers a virtualization machine solution that hosts Windows Server 2008, Windows 2000 Server Service Pack 4 and Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 and subsequent service packs. The virtualization solution can either be hypervisor-based or a hosted solution.

Cisco doesn’t have any hypervisor so there’s no reason to adhere this program.

At this point it’s hard to believe that the company will stay away of the server virtualization market for much more.