The service, which will be operational on September 1, 2006, includes standard and enterprise-level offerings with access to IT engineers, additional performance and memory capacity and continuous support.
Initially, Lorenzo Modesto, Bulletproof Networks general manager, said he expects most uptake in the SMB sector, particularly those that use top-end shared hosting.
"They may need a dedicated environment for customized hosting, [because] shared hosting can't support this," he said.
A shared Web hosting service is where more than one instance of the same Web service is hosted on a single physical server. It allows users to share the overall cost of server maintenance. However, a dedicated hosting service is where the client leases an entire server. This allows an organization full control over the server including choice of operating system and hardware.
"No other competitor offers a truly virtualized service," Modesto said. "We have seen a few working on Linux virtualization in the last 18 months; however, everything but VMware has a reliance on matching drivers to operating system hardware, or the host operating systems to the underlying operating systems," he said. "The hardware and the VMs running on top should have nothing to do with each other."
He said the benefits dedicated VMhosting offers over shared hosting include increased availability, speed of deployment and the ability to upgrade and downgrade and create clones for development.
"Before server virtualization, organizations typically ran multiple applications on the same server which reduced performance and stability," Modesto said.
"The only alternative was to buy a new physical server for each application, which could take weeks if not months to implement and often led to overspending and under utilization."
Modesto said VM hosting can be commissioned rapidly and removes the need to purchase and manage hardware.