As most of you have heard me pontificate about to no end; Virtualization is here and is changing the IT landscape. And if the reasons for migrating to a virtualized environment were not compelling enough on there own merits, the good people at VMware have made the move even easer with the windows based Converter product.

Converter, yet another free offering from VMware, is simply put – amazing software. After you load the small (about 20M) app on your windows system you answer a few wizard like questions, specify a disk target and let’er rip. Converter then turns your live physical system into a ready to go VM package. Did I mention it does this LIVE, to any Win XP, 2000 or 2003 system!

In fact the blog your reading right now is hosted on a “converted” VM. In my case the Windows web server the blog was hosted on, a Pentium III 733, was getting a bit long in the tooth, I loaded the converter and after about an hour of processing the system was moved over to a Linux VMware host.

If you are an existing VMware user checkout, and if this whole VMware thing is a mystery to you – go download your free copy of VM today (Http://www.vmware.com), it will change the way you think about computing.