"It all sounds pretty thorough and impressive and raises the bar yet again for VMware competitors Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, Sun and Virtual Iron."

Red Hat already have a virtualization storage API through libvirt (http://libvirt.org/storage.html) It is being used by Sun and VirtualIron too.

but they lack the sales penetration and tier of partner companies Vmware have, so VMware's storage API usage will paly a lot better

*Cough* SMI-S *Cough*

http://www.snia.org/forums/smi/