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VMware Ushers in a New Era of IT Management to Drive Business Agility with VMware vCenter™ Product Family

VMware Ushers in a New Era of IT Management to Drive Business Agility with VMware vCenter™ Product Family

New Management Model Focuses on Business Outcomes and Reduces Datacenter Operating Cost

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif., August 31, 2009 — Today at VMworld 2009, VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, unveiled a new management model for IT with the introduction of the VMware vCenter™ Product Family, a comprehensive set of solutions that provides policy-based, service-driven management to drive improved business agility. VMware vCenter™ Product Family builds on the innate capabilities of the industry’s most trusted and complete virtualization platform, VMware vSphere™ 4 to simplify management, reduce operating costs, and deliver more dynamic and flexible IT services.

Today’s IT infrastructure has become increasingly complex and inflexible, with the typical company spending upwards of 70 percent of IT budget simply to maintain IT operations. This overwhelming cost and complexity is partially due to the current approach of IT management, which focuses on managing component-level infrastructure in application and hardware silos. The VMware vCenter™ Product Family will evolve the IT management model to a higher level to focus on what IT should be measured on—business outcomes.

“VMware is uniquely positioned to evolve the way IT manages the datacenter, with the ability to inject policy across all layers of the stack to enable new levels of automation and efficiency,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, server business unit, VMware. “With the VMware vCenter™ family of products, customers will be able to dramatically simplify infrastructure management, service delivery, and application management eliminating tedious manual tasks, achieving greater visibility into datacenter operations, and ultimately guaranteeing service levels through set-and-forget policy-based control.”  

VMware vCenter™ Product Family

The VMware vCenter™ Product Family provides customers with a framework for policy-centric, SLA-driven management across dynamic infrastructure, enabling IT to operate more efficiently as an internal service provider. Tedious day-to-day tasks such as provisioning, monitoring and capacity, change, incident, and performance management can be automated based on pre-defined policies that drive desired business outcomes. Users can quickly and easily deploy virtual machines with specified service levels from a service catalog, view reports, monitor performance, and pay only for the services they use – without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure. This transformation shifts the paradigm from mere management of the “raw ingredients of IT,” i.e. component-level infrastructure management, to cloud-based delivery of IT services, dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of managing IT.

“With the vCenter Product Family, VMware provides a wide range of management solutions to automate critical tasks and drive operational efficiencies,” said Andi Mann, vice president of research, Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. “This compelling product family is exciting for customers as it can help them create an automated, self-healing, self-regulating datacenter.”

“At ACS, we are always looking for partners who can enable us to deliver expertise for our clients by helping increase efficiency through streamlining operations and reducing their overall expenses,” said Alton Ingram, infrastructure management manager for ACS.  “The VMware vCenter Family of Products allows us to spend significantly less time on routine administration for our database and enterprise messaging environments. As a result, we have more time to focus on delivering proactive and strategic projects for our customers.”

“In a virtual infrastructure where all resources are shared, optimal performance can only be achieved with the right amount of properly allocated resources,” said Mike Laskowski, solutions architect, R.R. Donnelly.  “With VMware vCenter Capacity IQ we can easily identify over- and under-provisioned VMs, helping us to reduce both waste and performance risk. CapacityIQ’s ‘what if analysis’ and reporting features help us with ongoing planning and deployment to ensure the right level of resources and the best possible ROI. Overall, VMware’s management capabilities give us confidence in our ability to meet the needs of the business as we further expand our virtual datacenter.”

The VMware vCenter™ Product Family is the most comprehensive set of solutions for managing services across the datacenter, with unmatched breadth and depth of capabilities for infrastructure management and service delivery.

Infrastructure Management

  • VMware vCenter AppSpeed provides visibility, service level reporting and proactive performance management for multi-tier applications, including virtualized and physical elements.
  • VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables adequate capacity to be available to virtual machines, resource pools, and entire datacenters by modeling the effect of capacity changes, forecasting shortfalls and proactively reclaiming excess capacity.
  • VMware vCenter ConfigControl will maintain visibility and enable compliance of configuration state in a dynamic virtual environment.
  • VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager accelerates recovery by automating the recovery process and simplifies management of disaster recovery plans by making disaster recovery an integrated element of managing your virtual datacenter.
    Service Delivery Management
  • VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager implements a consistent, automated process for managing the lifecycle of virtual machines, from provisioning to retirement.
  • VMware vCenter Chargeback enables accountability across the business by understanding, allocating and reporting on costs associated with the use of virtual infrastructure. 
  • VMware vCenter Lab Manager simplifies development, QA and pre-production environments by giving end users on-demand access to common system configurations while administrators maintain control over policies, ensure consistency throughout the release process and dramatically reduce hardware and provisioning costs. Another key aspect of the VMware vCenter™ Product Family is its extensibility framework, which allows for easy integration into existing management frameworks to ensure service levels across all application components, whether they are physical or virtual. This integration gives IT the ability to protect their investments and training in existing tooling from VMware’s broad ecosystem of management partners, while providing best of breed capabilities across the board. (See related press release also announced today: “Broad Virtualization Ecosystem Rallies Behind VMware vCenter™ Product Family to Deliver Integrated Solutions for Simplified Datacenter.”)
Pricing and Availability

VMware vCenter solutions are sold a la carte on a per processor basis. All products are generally available with the exception of VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, which is planned to ship in Q4 2009, and VMware vCenter ConfigControl, coming in 2010.
For more information about virtualization management solutions from VMware and the VMware vCenter Product Family, visit http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter/.

About VMworld 2009

Now in its sixth year, VMworld 2009, with more than 10,000 attendees and over 200 sponsors and exhibitors, is the must-attend event for IT professionals looking for actionable ideas, innovative products and best practices for virtualizing their business – from the desktop to the datacenter to the cloud.  Under the theme "Hello Freedom", VMware and virtualization are changing the world of IT – no longer is IT tethered to complicated, expensive and inefficient systems. Say goodbye to the limitations of the traditional ways of computing and hello to the power to innovate. See how virtualization frees the lives of those that embrace it. Super Sessions are being given by Platinum Sponsors Cisco, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Symantec, Wyse and VMware.  VMworld features more than 300 breakout sessions and hands-on labs, led by VMware and industry professionals, and is being held August 31- September 3 at Moscone Center in San Francisco.

About VMware

VMware delivers solutions for business infrastructure virtualization that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes.  With the industry leading virtualization platform – VMware vSphere™ – customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion  , more than 150,000 customers and 22,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. VMware is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.


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VMware and vCenter are registered trademarks and/or trademarks 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.

Forward-Looking Statements

Statements made in this press release which are not statements of historical fact are forward-looking statements and are subject to the safe harbor provisions created by the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Such forward-looking statements relate, but are not limited, to, customer adoption and deployment of virtualization products and architecture, including our products, and expectations for the release and delivery of our products.  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) the duration and deepening of negative economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in consumer or information technology spending; (iii) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures, industry consolidation, entry of new competitors into the virtualization market, and new product and marketing initiatives by our competitors; (iv) our customers’ ability to develop, and to transition to, new products, (v) the uncertainty of customer acceptance of emerging technology initiatives; (vi) rapid technological and market changes in virtualization software; (vii) changes to product development timelines; and (viii) our ability  to attract and retain highly qualified employees.  These forward looking statements are based on current expectations and are subject to uncertainties and changes in condition, significance, value and effect as well as other risks detailed in documents filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2009, which could cause actual results to vary from expectations. VMware disclaims any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.