VMware ESXi Hypervisor Now Free By VSM News Staff published: Monday, July 28 2008
With
Customers Deriving Value from More Than 20 Products in the VMware Portfolio,
Company Makes #1 Hypervisor Free
PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS
WIRE)-- VMware, Inc., (NYSE:VMW), the global leader in virtualization
solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced its stand-alone
ESXi hypervisor will be available at no cost to help companies of all sizes
experience the benefits of virtualization. Since 2001, VMware has provided the
industry's most popular and reliable hypervisor,
which is now used by more than 120,000 customers. In December 2007, VMware
announced significant improvements with ESXi -
its third-generation stand-alone hypervisor. With the industry's smallest footprint and OS-independence, ESXi sets a
new bar for security and reliability. ESXi 3.5 update 2, available today, meets
the criteria for mass distribution: (1) ease of use and (2) maturity and
stability now having been ‘battle tested' for six months with customers. The leading server
manufacturers have all embedded VMware ESXi, including Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens,
HP, IBM, and NEC. ESXi can be downloaded now from http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/
According to Gartner Vice President
Distinguished Analyst Tom Bittman, "Virtualization
is one of the most impactful trends in computing. The availability of free
hypervisors will undoubtedly grow the market and provide a compelling reason
for companies that have not virtualized their environment to begin doing so.
This is especially true for small to medium business customers and customers in
emerging markets. The hypervisor itself is really just a foundation. The
business model and real value in virtualization is evolving toward a
virtualized infrastructure and the management and automation tools leveraging
the hypervisor."
"VMware has always
believed that virtualization needs to be ubiquitous. We want to accelerate the
day that x86 servers and desktops are fully virtualized,""With the explosive growth of multi-core capacity,
improvements in virtualization-aware hardware, and performance improvements in
our virtualization software, we believe that no technical hurdles remain for
100% virtualization. Now we are removing financial hurdles as well. ESXi is
mature enough and easy enough to use that it can be the entry point into
virtualization for those companies just taking their first steps with the
technology."
said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions, VMware.
VMware ESXi is Easy to Deploy
and Manage
ESXi is purpose-built for running virtual
machines, minimizing configuration requirements and simplifying deployment.
Customers can go from installation to running virtual machines in minutes,
particularly when downloading and installing a pre-configured virtual
appliance. There are over 800 virtual appliances that have been created for the
VMware hypervisor on the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, and ESXi now
incorporates a direct integration with the Virtual Appliance Marketplace to
allow users to immediately download and run virtual appliances. This enables a
new and radically streamlined approach to plug-and-play software delivery and
installation. Read what partners are saying about ESXi here: http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/esxi_partner.html
"ESXi is a dynamic
and affordable entry point for learning about the power and benefits of
virtualization as we investigate a larger deployment with related products like
VMware Site Recovery Manager," said Ron Pike,
associate, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects LLP. "ESXi
integrates easily with our storage area network for simple deployment,
monitoring, and backup of our virtual machines."
Based in Portland, Oregon, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects is a
nationally recognized architecture, planning and interior design firm.
"ESXi installation
is so simple that it takes only a few minutes to get up and running," said Daniel Jacobs, systems analyst, Foothills
School Division. "Plus creating virtual machines
is a breeze and we can build them remotely in a few minutes. We run a number of
operating systems as virtual machines including both Linux and Windows and only
ESXi provides high quality support for them all."
Foothills School
Division in Alberta, Canada, is located in the front range of the Rocky Mountains, and offers innovative educational
services to its students and the community.
The Reliable, Secure and
Scalable Platform for Applications
Built on the proven and mature technology found
in the ESX hypervisor, named "most reliable" by publications like Redmond Magazine, ESXi extends
this tradition with an operating-system independent architecture that minimizes
attack surface area. ESXi offers features, such as 4 virtual CPUs, 256GB hosts,
and memory de-duplication, for running the most resource intensive
applications. This allows ESXi to offer the highest consolidation ratios and
thus the lowest TCO and cost per virtual machine. These features work equally
well across the broadest set of supported operating systems in the industry,
including Windows, Linux, Netware, and Solaris.
The Most Trusted Foundation for
Building a Virtual Datacenter
ESXi is the base virtualization platform that
customers can build upon for continuous application availability and
infrastructure security. VMware offers more than 20 additional software
products for datacenter virtualization, desktop virtualization, application and
infrastructure management and automation. With VMware Infrastructure 3, the
industry-leading datacenter virtualization and management suite, customers can add
to ESXi the benefits of centralized management, automatic load balancing,
business continuity, power management and the ability to move a virtual machine
across physical machines to minimize service interruption. VMware
Infrastructure 3 is also compatible with VMware's
desktop virtualization and management solutions.
VMware Infrastructure 3 is available in three
editions.
- VMware Infrastructure 3,
Foundation Edition enables centralized management with VirtualCenter,
automated patch management of physical and virtual machines with Update
Manager, and off-line backups with Consolidated Backup.
- VMware Infrastructure 3,
Standard Edition adds in VMware High Availability which automatically
restarts virtual machines on a new host when a physical server fails. This
provides an operating and application independent high availability
solution without the cost and complexity of clustering.
- VMware Infrastructure 3,
Enterprise Edition includes VMotion for the non-disruptive migration of
running virtual machines, Storage VMotion for the live migration of
virtual machine disks between storage locations, Distributed Resource
Scheduler for dynamic load balancing based on application demand, and
Distributed Power Management to reduce power consumption by powering down
idle server capacity.
Proven In the Most Demanding
Environments
Over 120,000 companies of all sizes and across
all industries are using VMware and its partner products to simplify their
infrastructure, dramatically reduce costs while improving service levels, and
provide cost-effective availability and disaster recovery solutions to all of
their applications. 100% of the Fortune 100 and 95% of the Fortune 1000 deploy
VMware products. 85% of customers deploy VMware in production with 46%
standardizing all or most new applications in a VMware virtual machine. The
performance, quality, and ROI of VMware encourage 90% of customers to recommend
VMware products to others. VMware virtualization is a fundamentally better way
to deliver IT services and is a core technology component for every IT
environment.
About VMware
VMware (NYSE:VMW) is the global leader in
virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter. Customers of all
sizes rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, ensure business
continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2007 revenues of $1.3
billion, more than 120,000 customers and nearly 18,000 partners, VMware is one
of the fastest growing public software companies. Headquartered in Palo Alto, California,
VMware is majority-owned by EMC Corporation (NYSE:EMC) and on the web at www.vmware.com.
VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc.
in the United States
and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be
trademarks of their respective companies.
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