EMC stock is rising amid speculation the company will sell off VMware, according to a Bloomberg story hot off the virtual press.

The story quotes one New York equity trader who says rumors about EMC selling its majority stake in VMware have been picking up recently. And another trader tells Bloomberg that observers are expecting some big news out of EMC’s annual meeting next week.

Virtualization.info chimes in that Intel is the rumored buyer.

EMC announced its plans to acquire VMware, the virtualization market giant, for $635 million late in 2003. VMware still operates independently from EMC and keeps its headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., across the country from EMC’s base in Hopkinton, Mass.

Microsoft says it delivered a “feature complete” release candidate of Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V today.

The RC has been qualified for guest OSes including Windows Server 2003 SP2, SUSE Enterprise Linux Server 10 SP1; Windows Vista SP1, and Windows XP SP3.

Host server Oses now include 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 standard, enterprise and data center editions in some languages (English, German).

Microsoft is banking big that its virtualization game plan will take share from market leader VMware and also bring new users into the virtualization fold.

Microsoft says it’s on track to deliver Hyper-V by August.

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

EMC is buying Pi Corp., and Pi’s founder, Paul Maritz, will now head EMC’s software-as-a-service effort. The news was reported by The New York Times and others.

And it is extremely interesting news. Maritz was a well-regarded top Microsoft exec for 14 years before taking his act on the road.

In its earlier “about” statement on the company Web site , Pi said its “next generation software environment” was expected to be available in both “free (open source) and licensed forms.” That open source verbiage is now only viewable in a cache. Hmmm.

Note: Pi ’s environment was going to help “users create, repurpose, store, share and access personal information in novel ways.” (Personal Information = PI. )

Barbara Darrow can be reached at bdarrow@techtarget.com.