"VMware leads the way in providing IT solutions that make customers' lives easier, and for SMB and ROBO customers, we provide a means of administering a robust, continuously available IT infrastructure with minimal overhead and high investment return," said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware. "VMware vSphere 4 will extend these benefits to customers of all sizes, needs and budgets with proven technology that enables them to do more with less."
VMware vSphere 4 is perhaps the only virtualization solution to deliver 'Always On IT' that meets the most critical needs of SMB and ROBO customers by providing zero-downtime application availability and comprehensive data protection features ideal for smaller IT environments:
• VMware Fault Tolerance and High Availability provides true continuous availability for infrastructure and applications to further enhance service continuity, enabling critical applications to run with zero downtime or data loss due to hardware failures.
• VMware VMotion reduces planned downtime from server maintenance activities by enabling the live migration of running virtual machines from one server to another with no disruption or downtime.
• VMware Data Recovery provides fully automated backup and recovery for all applications and data, with complete integration with VMware's management client for simple deployment and efficient operation.
• VMware vShield Zones secures applications and data inside a dynamic firewall that maintains complete protection across the physical and virtual environment with point-and-click ease.
VMware will introduce three new VMware vSphere 4 product editions for SMBs that deliver cost-effective server consolidation, high availability and data protection to enable Always On IT. Small businesses can deploy a server consolidation and management solution for only $166 per processor with VMware vSphere 4 Essentials and get higher application uptime with VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Plus (only $499 per processor)--these are features that are otherwise out of reach for most small companies. VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Plus is the only virtualization solution that provides high availability and data protection at this price point.
VMware's virtualization partner ecosystem, with more than 22,000 technology, channel and services partners, expects more than 500 technology partners to support VMware vSphere 4 by the end of 2009. This broad ecosystem provides SMB and ROBO customers with a wide variety of servers, storage devices, networking and applications that interoperate with VMware vSphere 4 and are fully supported by each vendor. In addition, VMware vCloud partners such as BlueLock and SunGard are delivering SMB business continuity and disaster recovery solutions that directly leverage the cloud.
VMware Fault Tolerance, VMware Data Recovery and VMware vShield Zones are expected to be generally available with VMware vSphere 4 Advanced later in the second quarter of 2009, while VMware vSphere 4 Essentials, VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Plus and VMware vSphere 4 Advanced are expected to be generally available from VMware and its network of OEM and channel partners later in the second quarter of 2009.