VMware Unveils Virtual Appliance Marketplace and Certification Program

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 7 /PRNewswire/ -- VMware, Inc., the global leader in software for industry-standard virtualized desktops and servers, today at VMworld 2006 announced it is launching a marketplace and certification program for virtual appliances. Customers can evaluate or in some cases purchase from a collection of more than 300 virtual appliances available in the Virtual Appliance Marketplace at http://vam.vmware.com/ .

Virtual appliances are pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run enterprise software applications packaged along with an operating system within virtual machines. Virtual appliances are fundamentally changing the application stack and how it is packaged and distributed, enabling ISVs to develop self-contained and optimized application stacks that are easy to deploy, run on any hardware, and are more secure and reliable. In addition, ISVs can pick an operating system of their choice that is customized for their workload, leading to smaller and more stable environments. Virtual appliances can be run on VMware Infrastructure, VMware Server or VMware Player.

"We've seen tremendous momentum around virtual appliances -- a virtual appliance is downloaded every minute from our Web site," said Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware. "Virtual appliances provide a better way to distribute pre-packaged, ready-to-run software for production and evaluation use. By deploying virtual appliances on VMware Infrastructure, customers gain additional benefits such as automatic load balancing with VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, high availability with VMware High Availability and agent-less backup with VMware Consolidated Backup. With the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace and certification program, customers can download virtual appliances that are optimized for VMware Infrastructure and designed for performance and usability."

* VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace. The process of evaluating, deploying and managing software is less problematic and much more efficient with a virtual appliance. Customers can simply download and start an appliance and when ready, the same application can be moved seamlessly into a production environment on VMware Infrastructure. More than 300 virtual appliances spanning collaboration, email security, enterprise applications, firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, operating systems and traffic management are available from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace at http://vam.vmware.com/. * VMware Virtual Appliance Certification Program. ISVs certify their appliances through the VMware Virtual Appliance Certification Program that provides them with technical best practices for performance and usability, validation testing and implementation feedback. The program also ensures that the ISV fully supports the entire virtual appliance environment. Current ISVs offering certified virtual appliances include Astaro, B-hive Networks, CohesiveFT, LoadBalancer, PortWise, ProofPoint, Red Hat, Reflex Security, SpamTitan, Ubuntu, Zeus and Zimbra. Certification details can be found at http://www.vmware.com/vmtn/appliances/certification.html.

"Astaro is pleased to offer a unified threat management security solution through the Virtual Appliance Marketplace," said Jan Hichert, CEO of Astaro Corp. "Now with support for VMware Infrastructure, Astaro offers enterprises a great value for their perimeter security needs with a single device that protects e-mail, Web and networks. The benefits of running Astaro as a virtual appliance are many, including lower cost of ownership in running data centers, conservation of power, stretching existing hardware investments and leveraging functionality such as VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler and VMware High Availability. And because Astaro's UTM solution is ASIC-free, performance when running in a virtual machine is maximized."

"B-hive Transaction Visibility Manager Virtual Edition offers an efficient way to analyze the performance of Web-enabled applications anywhere in the data center, and to rapidly identify and understand performance issues originating from inadequate resource allocation and application problems," said Yoav Dembak, CEO of B-hive Networks, Inc. "We are excited that Transaction Visibility Manager is a VMware Certified Virtual Appliance and available for immediate purchase in the Virtual Appliance Marketplace."

"We plan for all of our appliances to be certified through the VMware Virtual Appliance Certification Program. What we are seeing emerge is a new computing ecology that is lightweight, dynamic and loosely coupled -- and virtualization is a key enabling technology with VMware leading from the front with certified virtual appliances," said Patrick Kerpan, CTO of CohesiveFT. "Customers are already gaining confidence that this new generation of instant-on, certified and supported virtual appliances can be counted on in live business environments."

"PortWise's strategy to be a pure software play with a VMware virtual appliance provides our customers with all the ease of use features of hardware appliances, without restricting them to proprietary hardware with scalability limitations," said Kaushik Thakkar, vice president of strategic alliances and business development at PortWise. "Our banking and finance customers will benefit from a state-of-the-art combination of a VMware certified virtual appliance running on VMware Infrastructure."

"We've seen incredible interest from VMware's enterprise customer base since we introduced our virtual appliance offering last month," said Sandra Vaughan, senior vice president of products and marketing at ProofPoint. "We're excited to be charter participants in the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, which will greatly increase ProofPoint's visibility to the VMware user community. VMware users will find it easier than ever to download, try and purchase the ProofPoint Messaging Security Gateway Virtual Edition."

"ISVs and end users alike are moving to broadly adopt virtual appliances leveraging Red Hat and VMware solutions together," said Tim Yeaton, senior vice president and general manager of enterprise solutions at Red Hat. "Red Hat and VMware have worked together to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat Application Stack available as certified virtual appliances and as templates for developers and ISVs to create and distribute VMDK-based virtual appliances with."

"Our customers quickly recognized the need to balance the cost savings realized by virtualizing their servers and networks, and maintaining network security vigilance," said Bob Darabant, executive vice president of sales at Reflex Security. "With the Reflex VSA IPS certified virtual appliance, network security was easily deployed inside the virtualized network, adding back an important layer of defense in a cost-effective manner."

"We at SpamTitan have found that the move to a virtual appliance offering has opened up major benefits to both us and our customers," said Ronan Kavanagh, CEO of SpamTitan. "The level of interest since we launched the virtual solution has been huge with downloads of our product showing continued dramatic increases. We are delighted to be part of the VMware Virtual Appliance Certification Program. It lets our customers be confident about how our products are designed to perform in a VMware environment and also shows them VMware's commitment to the long-term benefits of the virtual appliance."

"In launching the Virtual Appliance Marketplace, VMware has made a bold play to create an ecosystem of solutions that will help organizations deploy and manage a completely virtualized data center environment," said Damian Reeves, CTO of Zeus Technology. "By joining this program, Zeus is able to help VMware customers improve the performance and resilience of their virtualized applications, giving them greater control over security, provisioning and traffic management."

"Many of our customers, like Homeland Internet, have already achieved a two-thirds reduction in total cost of ownership by deploying Zimbra and VMware together," said Satish Dharmaraj, CEO and co-founder of Zimbra. "Based on the tens of thousands of downloads we've already seen for our existing virtual appliance, the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace will make it even easier for other companies and service providers to try and deploy the Zimbra Virtual Appliance and realize a much better messaging experience plus dramatically improved TCO over other solutions."

About VMware, Inc.

VMware, an EMC company , is the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems. The world's largest companies 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. For more information, visit http://www.vmware.com/ or call 650-475-5000.

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