VMware Delivers Innovation for Customers Across Virtual Infrastructure Suite

PALO ALTO, Calif., Oct. 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- VMware, Inc., the virtualization leader, today announced the features of a new VMware Infrastructure release expected to be generally available later this year. The upcoming release of VMware Infrastructure, which will include the new VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5, will allow VMware customers to streamline the management of IT environments through greater levels of automation, increase overall infrastructure availability and boost performance for mission critical workloads. The new release will also include updated packaging and pricing, including new offerings specifically targeted at midsize and smaller IT environments.

"This release builds upon nearly a decade of continuous innovation," said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware. "We continue to drive improvements across the VMware Infrastructure suite. The new features, such as the first solution to move virtual machine disks across data stores, provide compelling value to customers of all sizes, whether they are small businesses or large enterprises."

VMware Infrastructure is VMware's third-generation, production-ready virtualization suite. According to a recent study of VMware customers, 90 percent of companies surveyed use VMware Infrastructure in production environments. With more than 120 industry and technology awards, VMware provides a much anticipated complete solution that meets customer demand for a next generation firmware hypervisor, enhanced virtual infrastructure capabilities, and advanced management and automation solutions.

"Customers are continually looking for more ways to take advantage of their virtualized infrastructure and to maximize the ROI the software can deliver to their organization," said John Humphreys, program vice president at IDC. "With the announcement of VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VMware VirtualCenter 2.5, VMware is raising the bar by not only enhancing existing features but taking virtualization to the next level with new capabilities for increased mobility and service availability. These new features can enable new use cases which in turn will help to drive new customer adoption of virtualization within the industry."

The new features in VMware Infrastructure meet the needs of a broad range of customers and IT environments -- from midsize and small businesses to branch offices and corporate datacenters within global 100 corporations -- and extend the value of all three layers of the virtualization suite.

"The new release will make our data center even more manageable and more flexible," said Kim Wisniewski, systems engineer at Curtin University of Technology. "For example, VMware Guided Consolidation will lower training costs for engineers new to VMware ESX Server and make it easier to extend virtualization throughout the organization. Also, VMware Storage VMotion will help us manage our virtual infrastructure storage lifecycles more effectively by giving us the ability to transparently move workloads away from storage needing downtime for maintenance, or dynamically rebalance storage workloads without affecting our virtual machines and the services they support."

"The VMware Update Manager addresses a process each virtual infrastructure administrator dreads facing: tracking patch levels, and applying current security patches and bug fixes across their environment," said Fazil Habibulla, vice president and systems engineer at Natixis. "VMware Update Manager allows for this through an automated update and remediation process within the entire virtual infrastructure environment -- not only easier for administration, but also for ensuring that all VMware ESX Server hosts and guest operating systems are secure. This functionality works on all hosts, templates and virtual machines, even those powered off or in a suspended state. From a risk control perspective, the ability to seamlessly automate patch management and security remediation from a centralized console is a huge value-add for us."

Virtualization platform enhancements help deliver new levels of performance, scalability and compatibility for running the most demanding workloads in virtual machines:

-- Expanded storage and networking choices such as support for SATA local storage, 10 Gig Ethernet, and Infiniband expand storage and networking choices for virtual infrastructure -- Support for TCP Segment Offload and Jumbo frames reduce the CPU overhead associated with processing network I/O -- Support for hardware nested page tables such as in processor assists for memory virtualization -- Support for paravirtualized Linux guest operating systems enables higher levels of performance through virtualization-aware operating systems -- Support for virtual machines with 64GB of RAM and physical machines with up to 128GB of memory

New virtual infrastructure capabilities help deliver increased infrastructure availability and resilience:

-- VMware Storage VMotion enables live migration of virtual machine disks from one data storage system to another with no disruption or downtime. VMware VMotion has become an indispensable tool for many infrastructure administrators to dynamically balance their server workloads and eliminate planned downtime for server maintenance. Storage VMotion extends VMotion to storage resources of a virtual machine, namely virtual disks. Using Storage VMotion, administrators can dynamically balance the storage workload and address performance bottlenecks by migrating virtual machine disks to the best available storage resource. Administrators can minimize service disruption previously incurred for upgrading storage arrays and free storage administrators to improve and manage the storage infrastructure without having to co-ordinate extensively with application and server owners. -- VMware Update Manager automates patch and update management for VMware ESX Server hosts and virtual machines. Update Manager addresses one of the most significant pain points for every IT department: tracking patch levels and manually applying the latest security/bug fixes. Patching of offline virtual machines enforces higher levels of patch standards compliance than physical environments. Integration with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) enables zero-downtime VMware ESX Server host patching capabilities.

New virtual infrastructure management solutions help deliver increased automation for streamlined managed of IT environments.

-- VMware Distributed Power Management is an experimental feature that reduces power consumption in the data center through intelligent workload balancing. Working in conjunction with VMware DRS, Distributed Power Management is designed to automatically power off servers not currently needed in order to meet service levels, and automatically power on servers as demand for compute resources increases. -- VMware Guided Consolidation, a feature of VMware VirtualCenter enables companies to get started with server consolidation in a step-by-step tutorial fashion. A wizard discovers physical servers, identifies consolidation candidates, converts them to virtual machines, and leveraging intelligently places them onto the best VMware ESX Server or VMware Server hosts. Guided Consolidation helps to make the consolidation process quick and easy for users with little knowledge of virtualization. Availability, Packaging and Pricing

The new release of VMware Infrastructure will be available later in 2007. Updated packaging and pricing for VMware Infrastructure will go into effect concurrent with the general availability later in 2007. VMware Infrastructure will be available for purchase in the following editions:

-- VMware ESX Server 3i, providing single server partitioning, will be delivered embedded as firmware in server systems or as a standalone purchase for hard-drive installation. If purchased standalone for hard-drive installation, ESX Server 3i list price will be $495 per 2 processors. -- VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation (previously called "Starter") will include VMware ESX Server, VMware ESX Server 3i, VMware Consolidated Backup and the new VMware Update Manager. Unlike the previous VMware Infrastructure 3 Starter, VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation will have no restrictions on shared storage connectivity, memory utilization or number of CPUs of the physical server. VMware Infrastructure Foundation list price will be $995 per 2 processors. -- VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard is designed to bring higher levels of resiliency to IT environments at greater value. In addition to the capabilities of VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation, VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard will include VMware HA which provides automated restart of virtual machines affected by hardware failure. VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard list price will be $2995 per 2 processors. -- VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise contains the entire array of virtual infrastructure capabilities for resource management, workload mobility, and high availability. In addition to the capabilities in VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard, it also includes VMware VMotion, VMware Storage VMotion, and VMware DRS with Distributed Power Management (DPR). VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise list price will be $5750 per 2 processors. -- VMware VMotion, Storage VMotion and DRS with DPM will also be available for standalone purchase with VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation and Standard. -- Existing VMware Infrastructure customers with valid support and subscription contracts will receive the new products and features included in each edition at no additional cost.

VMware will also introduce a range of packaging and pricing options specifically targeted at midsize and smaller IT environments. These new packaging and pricing options become available concurrent with the general availability of the new version of VMware Infrastructure. For more information, please visit http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/esx_35_smb.html.

About VMware

VMware is the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems. Organizations of all sizes use VMware solutions to simplify their IT, fully leverage their existing computing investments and respond faster to changing business demands. VMware is based in Palo Alto, California and majority-owned by EMC Corporation . For more information, visit http://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.

This release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined under the Federal Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in consumer or information technology spending; (iii) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (iv) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (v) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (vi) war or acts of terrorism; (vii) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (viii) fluctuating currency exchange rates; and (ix) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in VMware's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. VMware disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.

Contact: Melinda Marks VMware, Inc. mmarks@vmware.com (650) 427-1103 Kristen Whisenand OutCast Communications for VMware kristen@outcastpr.com (415) 392-8282 x7