VMware ESXi Hypervisor Now Free

Tag : Stand By Power
VMware, Inc., theglobal leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to thedatacenter, today announced its stand-alone ESXi hypervisor will beavailable at no cost to help companies of all sizes experience thebenefits of virtualization. Since 2001, VMware has provided theindustry ’ s most popular and reliable hypervisor, which is now used by morethan 120,000 customers. In December 2007, VMware announcedsignificant improvements with ESXi – its third-generation stand-alone hypervisor. With the industry ’ s smallest footprint and OS-independence, ESXi sets a new bar forsecurity and reliability. ESXi 3.5 update 2, available today, meetsthe 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 manufacturershave all embedded VMware ESXi, including Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP,IBM, and NEC.
According to Gartner Vice President Distinguished Analyst TomBittman, “ Virtualization is one of the most impactful trends in computing.The availability of free hypervisors will undoubtedly grow themarket and provide a compelling reason for companies that have notvirtualized their environment to begin doing so. This is especiallytrue for small to medium business customers and customers inemerging markets. The hypervisor itself is really just afoundation. The business model and real value in virtualization isevolving toward a virtualized infrastructure and the management andautomation tools leveraging the hypervisor. ”
“ VMware has always believed that virtualization needs to beubiquitous. We want to accelerate the day that x86 servers anddesktops are fully virtualized, ” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions,VMware. “ With the explosive growth of multi-core capacity, improvements invirtualization-aware hardware, and performance improvements in ourvirtualization software, we believe that no technical hurdlesremain for 100% virtualization. Now we are removing financialhurdles as well. ESXi is mature enough and easy enough to use thatit can be the entry point into virtualization for those companiesjust taking their first steps with the technology. ”
VMware ESXi is Easy to Deploy and Manage
ESXi is purpose-built for running virtual machines, minimizingconfiguration requirements and simplifying deployment. Customerscan go from installation to running virtual machines in minutes,particularly when downloading and installing a pre-configuredvirtual appliance. There are over 800 virtual appliances that havebeen created for the VMware hypervisor on the VMware VirtualAppliance Marketplace, and ESXi now incorporates a directintegration with the Virtual Appliance Marketplace to allow usersto immediately download and run virtual appliances. This enables anew and radically streamlined approach to plug-and-play softwaredelivery and installation.
“ ESXi is a dynamic and affordable entry point for learning about thepower and benefits of virtualization as we investigate a largerdeployment 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 simpledeployment, monitoring, and backup of our virtual machines. ” Based in Portland, Oregon, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects is anationally recognized architecture, planning and interior designfirm.
“ ESXi installation is so simple that it takes only a few minutes toget up and running, ” said Daniel Jacobs, systems analyst, Foothills School Division. “ Plus creating virtual machines is a breeze and we can build themremotely in a few minutes. We run a number of operating systems asvirtual machines including both Linux and Windows and only ESXiprovides high quality support for them all. ” Foothills School Division in Alberta, Canada, is located in thefront range of the Rocky Mountains, and offers innovativeeducational 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 ESXhypervisor, named “ most reliable ” by publications like Redmond Magazine, ESXi extends this traditionwith an operating-system independent architecture that minimizesattack surface area. ESXi offers features, such as 4 virtual CPUs,256GB hosts, and memory de-duplication, for running the mostresource intensive applications. This allows ESXi to offer thehighest consolidation ratios and thus the lowest TCO and cost pervirtual machine. These features work equally well across thebroadest 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 buildupon for continuous application availability and infrastructuresecurity. VMware offers more than 20 additional software productsfor datacenter virtualization, desktop virtualization, applicationand infrastructure management and automation. With VMwareInfrastructure 3, the industry-leading datacenter virtualizationand management suite, customers can add to ESXi the benefits ofcentralized management, automatic load balancing, businesscontinuity, power management and the ability to move a virtualmachine 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 centralizedmanagement with VirtualCenter, automated patch management ofphysical and virtual machines with Update Manager, and off-linebackups with Consolidated Backup. VMware Infrastructure 3, Standard Edition adds in VMware HighAvailability which automatically restarts virtual machines on a newhost when a physical server fails. This provides an operating andapplication independent high availability solution without the costand complexity of clustering. VMware Infrastructure 3, Enterprise Edition includes VMotion forthe non-disruptive migration of running virtual machines, StorageVMotion for the live migration of virtual machine disks betweenstorage locations, Distributed Resource Scheduler for dynamic loadbalancing based on application demand, and Distributed PowerManagement to reduce power consumption by powering down idle servercapacity.
Proven In the Most Demanding Environments
Over 120,000 companies of all sizes and across all industries areusing VMware and its partner products to simplify theirinfrastructure, dramatically reduce costs while improving servicelevels, and provide cost-effective availability and disasterrecovery solutions to all of their applications. 100% of theFortune 100 and 95% of the Fortune 1000 deploy VMware products. 85%of customers deploy VMware in production with 46% standardizing allor most new applications in a VMware virtual machine. Theperformance, quality, and ROI of VMware encourage 90% of customersto recommend VMware products to others. VMware virtualization is afundamentally better way to deliver IT services and is a coretechnology component for every IT environment.