CANNES, France, Feb. 26, 2008 VMware (NYSE: VMW) and HP (NYSE: HPQ) today announced VMware’s ultra-thin hypervisor software, VMware ESX 3i, is expected to be broadly integrated and available beginning March 31, 2008, on 10 models of HP ProLiant servers. The joint offering helps customers adopt virtualization with greater speed and simplicity. Virtualization helps companies share and pool technology resources to better optimize their datacenters, resulting in greater flexibility to meet business demands and business pressures to reduced costs.
VMware ESX 3i for HP ProLiant features VMware virtualization capabilities with full support for HP System Insight Manager (SIM), the rich set of server management tools that come standard with HP ProLiant servers. This integrated offering enables customers to deploy VMware’s base hypervisor within minutes of booting up a ProLiant server, providing greater speed and simplicity for customers new to virtualization, as well as increased capacity expansion for customers who are already use VMware’s datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3).
In addition, HP and VMware have worked together to make available software bundles that combine the VMware Infrastructure 3 software suite and additional automation products, with HP Insight Control Environment. These bundles offer customers a complete solution for seamless physical and virtual platform management.
“We are excited to work with HP to simplify datacenter management by pre-installing and pre-configuring VMware ESX 3i on HP ProLiant systems,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer, VMware. “Today’s announcement is a major step forward in accelerating the adoption of virtualization by combining our respective strengths: HP’s global footprint with the ProLiant platform and rich heritage in platform manageability, and VMware’s portfolio of products for datacenter virtualization, desktop virtualization, and management and automation solutions for both the datacenter and desktop.”
“These unified offerings from HP and VMware help customers reduce costs and simplify the management and automation of virtual environments, leading to improved quality of the services that customers deploy,” said James Mouton, general manager and senior vice president, Industry Standard Servers, HP. “The combination of HP’s hardware and management tools with VMware’s industry-leading virtualization solutions delivers a truly differentiated experience. We are committed to supporting our customers’ needs for virtualized environments.”
VMware ESX 3i, HP ProLiant and System Insight Manager: Rock-solid Foundation for Industry-standard Virtualization
The combination of the market-leading HP ProLiant server lines with VMware’s rock-solid virtualization solutions fast-tracks customers onto the path to running a virtual datacenter.
The VMware ESX 3i hypervisor is based on core VMware virtualization technology in use by more than 100,000 customers. It is the industry’s smallest hypervisor (32MB), enabling high levels of security and reliability, and it is the only OS-independent virtualization platform. VMware ESX 3i delivers single-server consolidation with fast and easy deployment—the first virtual machine can operate within minutes of booting a server with pre-configured and optimized hardware configurations. Customers can upgrade from VMware ESX 3i hypervisor to VMware’s datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3). VI3 provides the capability for automatic load balancing, business continuity and power management and the ability to move a virtual machine across physical machines to minimize service interruption. VI3 is also compatible with VMware’s desktop virtualization and management solutions.
HP ProLiant is HP’s family of industry-standard server, storage, blade and facility solutions, providing the innovation, total cost discipline and trusted experience that are the cornerstones of an adaptive infrastructure.
VMware ESX 3i for HP ProLiant provides seamless, out-of-the box integration with HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM), the industry’s only unified storage and server management platform. HP Systems Insight Manager 5.2 software incorporates user-friendly features and an improved installation process, and it supports association and discovery for VMware ESX 3i. Enhanced hardware alerting and inventory management allows customers to actively receive information about the health of their ProLiant servers. This enables companies to resolve server problems before they result in actual downtime, eliminate risk and lower potential costs. Future revisions to VMware ESX 3i for HP ProLiant can be made using the same tool used to update ProLiant system firmware. This feature helps simplify time-consuming lifecycle management—an example of the process efficiencies that can be achieved with close integration of VMware virtualization with ProLiant tools and platforms.
VMware Infrastructure and HP Insight Control: New Options for Integrated and Automated Physical and Virtual Datacenter Management
Customers who deploy VMware ESX 3i for HP ProLiant will be able to easily integrate their systems into their VMware Infrastructure environments, delivering the highest level of performance, availability and manageability for their datacenters. VMware Infrastructure virtualizes servers, storage and networks to transform manually-intensive datacenters into automated, self-managing virtual datacenters. For such datacenters, the unique OS-independent architecture of VMware virtualization delivers maximum reliability, uptime and security through reduced, firmware-like patching and a minimal security attack “surface area.” The pre-integration of VMware ESX 3i with ProLiant platforms also allows existing VI3 customers to expand their resource capacity with plug-and-play simplicity and also reduce in-house testing and certification.
In addition to SIM 5.2, VMware ESX 3i for HP ProLiant supports management tools from the HP Insight Control portfolio to unify the management of virtual and non-virtual machines. To extend management across storage, customers can also use HP StorageWorks storage area network and network attached storage solutions. HP’s unified management approach enables better control of assets through a common set of tools.
Also, HP Software’s Business Technology Optimization portfolio and the HP Data Center Automation Center automate the complete lifecycle of operations for heterogeneous datacenter environments that include virtual and non-virtual systems. The HP Data Center Automation solution works with HP Systems Insight Manager, providing a comprehensive solution for management of virtualized systems. HP’s unified management approach enables better insight and control of assets and automates their management through a common set of tools.
Availability
HP and VMware plan to make VMware ESX 3i for HP ProLiant available worldwide March 31, 2008, directly to customers and for channel partners to pre-integrate single server virtualization onto 10 high-volume ProLiant server models.
Customers can also get CarePack support services, sold as options with the base-level offering, and as a standard component of VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise Edition. HP offers integrated support of both ProLiant servers and VMware products.
More information is available at www.hp.com/go/vmware.