This is my own speculation, because I’m not privy to any information from either companies, but only based on blog conjecture and various infos…

Will Cisco buy EMC (who owns a majority of the VMware stock), or will Cisco buy VMware of EMC . With Cisco’s project California (Compute Blades) due to come out shortly, the tension is building up…

EMC must know that VMware is a great financial asset to it’s future, yet EMC might rather sell VMware for a good value rather than taking the risk of being bought itself by Cisco, and so losing it’s independance.

“Specs of the new blades servers that surface on website and blogs: include Intel Core i7 processors, 192GB Memory, PCI Express connectivity (providing access to Cisco Unified Fabric Architecture with direct communication between the blades and the storage servers” Source InternetNews