News Releases•3 min read

VMware Announces General Availability of VMware vSphere® 5

 

VMware Announces General Availability of VMware vSphere® 5

Latest Version of Industry Leading Virtualization Platform Helps Customers Accelerate Toward More Efficient and Automated Cloud Infrastructure

PALO ALTO, Calif. Aug. 25, 2011 —VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today announced the general availability of VMware vSphere® 5, delivering nearly 200 new and enhanced capabilities to help customers transform IT by driving greater efficiency from existing investments and improving operational agility.

"With the release of VMware vSphere 5, VMware is helping customers accelerate their journey toward a more efficient and automated cloud infrastructure," said Bogomil Balkansky, senior vice president, cloud infrastructure products, VMware. "The enhancements and new innovations we've introduced in VMware vSphere 5 provide a robust, reliable platform for business applications, enabling customers to effectively respond to the growing needs of their business and giving them confidence in their IT transformation."

The foundation of VMware's cloud infrastructure suite, VMware vSphere 5, includes new features and enhancements to deliver better application performance and availability for all business-critical applications. It also introduces advanced automation capabilities to free IT from manual processes and allow it to be more responsive to changing business requirements.

VMware vSphere 5 supports virtual machines (VMs) that are up to four times more powerful than previous versions - VMs can now be configured with up to 1 terabyte of memory and 32 virtual CPUs. When combined with VMware vSphere 5's enhanced High Availability, these gains in VM scalability and performance enable customers to virtualize any business-critical applications with confidence in the application's continued performance and availability.

VMware vSphere 5 also introduces three key new flagship features – Auto-Deploy, Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS – that extend the platform's unique datacenter resource management capabilities, delivering intelligent policy management to support an automated "set it and forget it" approach to managing datacenter resources, including server deployment and storage management. Customers can define policies and establish the operating parameters, and VMware vSphere 5 does the rest.

VMware vSphere 5 and the cloud infrastructure suite are supported by more than 25,000 partners, including technology partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), solution providers, service providers, and systems integrators, as well as every major global hardware manufacturer. VMware's partner community continues to mature as the company consistently sets the bar for innovation in virtualization and cloud technologies. Read more about ecosystem support for VMware vSphere 5.

Pricing and Availability

VMware vSphere 5 is currently available in packages and prices that address the widest range of customer requirements, starting at $83 per processor.  Visit the VMware vSphere Upgrade Center for more information on licensing and editions.

Additional Resources

About VMware

VMware delivers virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions 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 2010 revenues of $2.9 billion, more than 250,000 customers and 25,000 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.

 

# # #

VMware and VMware vSphere 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. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.