Cisco’s UCS Virtual solution is the future. The ability to scale resources on demand without integrating additional hosts into a cluster gets us closer to the evitable mainframe configuration. The upper end limitations of UCS has changed the landscape of virtual infrastructures for scalability under one instance. Cisco will hold the temporary keys to this innovation while other virtualization companies catch up. For those upgrading to Cisco’s solution now this scalability will come at a price. Cisco will produce proprietary hardware solutions. It will take a while for other vendors to enable this functionality for commodity hardware. Adoption of Cisco’s UCS solution will likely struggle for the same reasons blade servers struggled shortly after their introduction; blades lacked a unified backplane standard. Purchasers of blade solutions were locked into the same vendor once the blade chassis was purchased. Due to this lock in choice was removed when the need to add resources arose. Cisco’s customers are now in the same boat.  At the current high price point cost alone may slow adoption enough to allow other virtualization vendors a chance to close the gap on the commodity resource problem. Cisco has the vision right and is on the right path, with proper execution they could own a very large share of the market if their competitors cannot solve technical hurdles in the near future.