After leaping out of the gate yesterday with the hottest IPO of the year, VMware is again climbing big-time today, up about 13 percent in midafternoon trading in New York.

That's got to have the people at Seattle-based virtualization startup illumita, which pulled down $6 million in funding last week, feeling pretty good. (Did we mention they're hiring? They are.) Their investors are probably smiling broadly, too, especially the guys over at Bellevue-based Ignition Partners.

An earlier virtualization bet that Ignition made on XenSource paid off handsomely today when Citrix Systems announced plans to buy the company for about $500 million in cash and stock. Here's analysis from Mary Jo Foley on what the Citrix-XenSource combination could mean for Microsoft.