VMware Announces ESX Server 2 For The Most Demanding Production Environments

Market Leader Delivers Major New Release With Unprecedented Scalability and Availability

PALO ALTO, Calif., July 21, 2003 -- VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual machine software for industry-standard systems, today announced the general availability of VMware ESX Server 2, the latest release of its enterprise-class virtual machine software for the most demanding production environments.

For more than two years, enterprises have been virtualizing their computing environments using ESX Server to drive utilization rates of individual servers from less than 5% to over 80%. ESX Server works by carving multi-processor servers into smaller servers or virtual machines, allowing multiple operating systems, including Microsoft Windows and Linux, to run simultaneously and independently on the same industry-standard server or blade. With VMware Virtual SMP, a single virtual machine can now span two processors, making it possible for enterprises to deploy all of their mission-critical applications in flexible, secure and portable virtual machines.

"ESX Server 2 with Virtual SMP is key to Praxair's IT server consolidation strategy," said Larry Lichten, director of Infrastructure, Praxair. "Our goal is to provide an IT infrastructure that enhances the company's business agility. With VMware's virtualization technology, we can reduce costs and maximize resource utilization while at the same time creating a more flexible, efficient infrastructure that responds rapidly to changing business requirements."

"VMware ESX Server is a critical technology for our IT operation," said Josh Heller, sr. technical specialist, Black & Decker. "For example, we've been able to prepare for a highly cost-effective rollout of Exchange 2003 to our other business units because we only needed to buy two physical servers to provide a central directory, instead of 18. We've also been able to replace our old lab full of obsolete equipment with one server to do all our test and development on new infrastructure applications and updates. We expect the new SMP capability of ESX Server 2 to help us get even more benefits from virtualization as we apply this technology to more of our environments."

"We started using ESX Server to solve our problem with state agencies running different versions of Oracle Forms and Reports software. Once we saw how easy it was to provision a new server whenever we needed one, we started to move everything we could into virtual machines. Right now we have about 30 virtual machines running production applications on just four physical servers, and we're starting to look at using ESX Server for clustering and high availability. We recently started moving some of our Citrix environment to ESX Server and have had much success. It's a great technology that saves us money and gives us more flexibility in managing our servers," said David Pearson, Windows lead system administrator, State of Montana.

ESX Server 2 is the first product to take advantage of VMware Control Center, a groundbreaking new product that advances utility computing. With Control Center, enterprises can centrally manage and control all of their virtual machines and maximize utilization of their entire server farm. Using VMotion technology in Control Center, enterprises can respond to changing business demands in real-time and move live, running virtual machines from one physical server to another with continuous service availability.

"ESX Server 2 is a major step forward in virtualization technology. The product's new features and capabilities like support for Virtual SMP take scalability and availability to the next level, making ESX Server ideal for the most demanding production environments," said Diane Greene, president and CEO, VMware.

ESX Server runs directly on the hardware and provides fine-grained resource controls that adapt to the needs of mission-critical applications. The resource management capabilities of ESX Server make it possible to control the levels and limits of CPU, networking, memory and disk I/O allocated to and used by each virtual machine.

New and enhanced features in ESX Server 2 include:

Scalability

• Support for VMware Virtual SMP - Lets up to two processors work together to share the workload of resource-intensive applications and tasks running in a virtual machine
• Increased Virtual Machine Support - Supports 80 active virtual machines or 40 virtual machines with Virtual SMP
• NUMA Support - Enhances performance by automatically optimizing memory locality for the best possible utilization of CPUs in NUMA environments

High Availability

• NIC Teaming - Increases network reliability and performance, while simplifying network topologies
• Advanced File System - Provides greater availability features as well as support for large storage configurations

New Platform Support

• Support for Blade Servers - HP ProLiant BL20p and IBM BladeCenter
• Support for Broad Range of Operating Systems - Microsoft Windows Server 2003 (Standard, Enterprise, Web), Microsoft Windows 2000 Server (Standard, Advanced), Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Microsoft Windows NT 4, RedHat Advanced Server 2.1, RedHat 7.3, 8.0, 9.0, SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 8 and SuSE Linux 8.2
• SAN Path Failover - Enhanced reliability with built-in failover support

Better Usability

• New Management User Interface - Improved navigation, better performance and intuitive interface make configuring and managing virtual machines a snap
• Better Resource Controls - Specify minimum and maximum percentages of each CPU to allocate per virtual machine from the user interface
• Microsoft Windows Support - COM APIs. Virtual LSI SCSI adapter simplifies the installation of Microsoft Windows 2003

Pricing and Availability

ESX Server 2 and Virtual SMP, an add-on module to ESX Server 2, are available today. Pricing for ESX Server starts at $3,750 for a 2 CPU machine; pricing for Virtual SMP is $1250 for a 2 CPU machine. ESX Server and Virtual SMP are available from VMware, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, IBM and NEC. VMware Sales can be reached at sales@vmware.com and 1-877-4VMWARE. For customers who have purchased earlier versions of ESX Server and have a current support and subscription contract, ESX Server 2 is included as a free upgrade.

About VMware, Inc.

VMware, Inc. is the global leader in virtual machine software for industry-standard systems. With more than 5,000 customers worldwide and 80% of the Fortune 100, VMware provides companies with a proven set of enterprise products and solutions to consolidate their server infrastructure, improve software lifecycle management and provide application compatibility in mixed operating system environments. VMware's products enable companies to flexibly scale and control their infrastructure to quickly respond to business demands, improve return on investment and dramatically reduce total cost of ownership. VMware is based in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit www.vmware.com or call 650-475-5000.

# # #

(C) 2003 VMware, Inc. all rights reserved. VMware and ESX Server are trademarks of VMware, Inc. All other trademarks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies.