VMware Raises the Bar with VMware Infrastructure 3

Next Generation of Industry-leading Infrastructure Virtualization Software Suite Enables Transformative Cost Savings and Breakthrough Levels of Efficiency, Flexibility and Serviceability to IT Environments of All Sizes

PALO ALTO, Calif., June 5, 2006 -- VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today launched VMware Infrastructure 3, the third generation of the industry-leading infrastructure virtualization software suite that empowers enterprises and small businesses alike to optimize and manage their IT environments through virtualization.

The first generation of virtualization for industry-standard systems provided server partitioning through a hypervisor or hosted architecture. The second generation added management, capacity planning, a physical to virtual assistant and other tools for consolidating production servers. The third generation, VMware Infrastructure 3, enables systems infrastructure capabilities for entire farms of servers and storage, independent of the application/operating system workloads and of the underlying hardware.

VMware Infrastructure 3 builds upon the award-winning VMware ESX Server with Virtual SMP and VirtualCenter with VMotion technology used in production at tens of thousands of enterprises worldwide today and incorporates four new groundbreaking products - VMware VMFS, a next generation Distributed File System; VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS); VMware High Availability (HA); and VMware Consolidated Backup. The suite is designed to deliver comprehensive virtualization, management, resource optimization, application availability and operational automation capabilities in an integrated offering.

With VMware Infrastructure 3, VMware is ushering in a new era for data centers where industry-standard infrastructure farms can be managed as a shared utility and dynamically allocated to different business units or projects. New capacity can be added or removed non-disruptively based on business demand. Applications can be migrated automatically to available hardware resources. Hardware failures can be automatically overcome with minimal disruption. Business data can be protected with minimal impact to production SLAs. Applications can be provisioned instantly and recovered at the same or remote locations easily regardless of the operating system and hardware. Customers will be able to transform IT service levels, simplify and automate their infrastructure and deploy virtualization pervasively across their entire environment.

"VMware Infrastructure 3 transforms the role of hardware and software so that the business can truly think in terms of deploying services on a pool of continuously available hardware resources," said Diane Greene, president of VMware. "Instead of server boxes specifically configured for a given operating system and application, there is now a set of applications mapped to a large pool of resources and the constraint of thinking about individual hardware components becomes an old-fashioned concept. We'll look back on it as the difficult way we used to do things."

"We are very excited that VMware is turning the vision of the automated, self-optimizing data center into reality. Using VMware Infrastructure enterprise-wide since January 2005, Enbridge Energy has streamlined its IT infrastructure, saving more than $1 million in hardware costs," said Ed Baldwin, senior network engineer for Enbridge Energy Company, Inc., a leader in energy transportation and a VMware Infrastructure 3 beta customer. "The release of VMware Infrastructure 3 supports our plan to virtualize more applications across the company."

Baldwin continued: "The new products and capabilities in VMware Infrastructure 3 bring even greater efficiency and flexibility to our infrastructure. For example, with VMware DRS our data center can be automated like never before. The new 4-Way Virtual SMP also opens new frontiers for us - now we can create virtual machines for even the most processor and memory intensive applications such as databases, ERP and CRM."

"Société de transport de Montréal provides 1.3 million trips on its system every day. With VMware Infrastructure, Société de transport de Montréal was able to cut costs by 30% and management sleeps better at night knowing that customers will be able to get transportation information, even in the event of a disaster in our data center," said Mike Stefanakis, senior systems engineer at Société de transport de Montréal, an agency that operates buses and the Métro in Canada and a VMware Infrastructure 3 beta customer. "With VMware Infrastructure 3, we can confidently run the most processor-, storage- and memory-intensive applications in virtual machines. DRS will also minimize the need for manual intervention. VMware HA and VMware Consolidated Backup will further facilitate our seamless user experience which is crucial to our company."

"Virtualization is rapidly evolving from being a server consolidation tool to becoming the strategic technology foundation for IT Infrastructure," said Stephen Elliot, research manager at IDC. "While the cost savings are obvious, sophisticated enterprise IT organizations are starting to deliver end-to-end virtual infrastructure that uses standardized management processes and provides a compelling answer to the CIO's need for an agile, efficient and dynamic infrastructure that is radically simple to operate."

VMware Infrastructure 3 Enables Efficiency, Flexibility and Serviceability through Enterprise-scale Management and Service-level Automation

VMware Infrastructure 3 incorporates VirtualCenter, the market-leading management product for virtualized environments for more than three years. VirtualCenter can automate and simplify the operations of a virtualized data center with several new capabilities:

• VirtualCenter is designed to handle three times the number of hosts and virtual machines under management compared to previous releases.
• Topology maps and centralized configuration of ESX Server hosts bring drag-and-drop simplicity to the management of enterprise-wide virtualization environments.
• VMware DRS and VMotion technology dynamically aggregate hardware resources into logical resource pools and are designed to optimally allocate them to applications running in virtual machines. When a virtual machine experiences an increased load, VMware DRS automatically allocates additional resources by redistributing virtual machines among the physical servers.
• VMware HA is designed to eliminate single points of hardware failure by automatically relocating and restarting virtual machines. HA is designed to provide uniform high availability across the entire virtualized IT environment without the cost and complexity of failover solutions tied to either operating systems or specific applications.
• VMware Consolidated Backup simplifies data protection by offloading backup to a centralized server. Offloading backup allows ESX Server to run more virtual machines by reducing its load and enables backup to safely occur even during production hours.
• Rich security controls, comprehensive auditing capabilities and administrative roles enable a secure, auditable operations environment where responsibilities may be delegated among different groups without compromising overall security and compliance.

VMware Infrastructure 3 Enables Transformative Cost Savings through Server, Storage and Network Virtualization

VMware Infrastructure 3 incorporates VMware ESX Server, the industry's most advanced server, storage and network virtualization platform for industry-standard servers. ESX Server extends a proven architecture that has delivered more than seven years of rock-solid virtualization and more than two years of continuous uptime at select customers. New innovative capabilities include:

• Improved levels of performance, scalability and robustness to deliver even greater levels of consolidation and cost-savings. The new version expands virtual machine capacity limits by over 50%, improves performance for targeted workloads and usage scenarios.
• 4-Way Virtual SMP capabilities to enable virtualization of large enterprise applications that can scale to take advantage of 4 virtual CPUs and 16 GB of memory.
• Power management capabilities to increase the power savings associated with virtualization and augment the significant cost savings enjoyed by customers.
• Native support for iSCSI SAN and NAS storage to enable customers to virtualize infrastructure at branch offices and other distributed locations using low cost storage.
• Network virtualization capabilities include expanded support for VLANs as well as network configuration policies and interoperability. Network ports and connections can be consolidated to deliver easier management and cost savings while preserving logical network separation.
• Storage virtualization capabilities that are delivered through VMFS for aggregating storage from heterogeneous storage arrays and dynamically pooling them into virtual volumes that are made available to applications. Direct-attached storage can be cost-effectively consolidated into centrally managed, highly available SAN environments.

VMware Infrastructure 3 Offers Broadest Hardware and Operating System Choice

• VMware Infrastructure 3 is optimized and rigorously tested with more than 200 combinations of servers, storage systems and management software. Customers can deploy virtualization on practically any industry-standard data center hardware.
• VMware Infrastructure 3 is not tied to any operating system, giving customers a bias-free choice of operating system and software applications. VMware Infrastructure 3 is tested and supported to run 28 flavors of Windows, Linux, Netware and Solaris.
• VMware Infrastructure 3 can run virtual machines created in Microsoft Virtual Server and Virtual PC and Symantec LiveState Recovery images.

VMware Infrastructure 3 Packaged and Priced for Adoption Across All Market Segments

The rich capabilities of VMware Infrastructure are packaged into three editions targeted for various IT infrastructure environments:

• VMware Infrastructure Starter is an offering designed for easy adoption in small and medium businesses as well as branch and distributed locations within large companies. VMware Infrastructure Starter includes ESX Server with local or NAS storage and full management capabilities through the included VirtualCenter management agent. VMware Infrastructure Starter list price is $1000 per two processors.
• VMware Infrastructure Standard is designed for virtualizing enterprise workloads. In addition to ESX Server, it includes clustered VMFS for enterprise storage connectivity and consolidation, Virtual SMP and the VirtualCenter management agent. VMware Infrastructure Standard list price is $3750 per two processors.
• VMware Infrastructure Enterprise is designed as the core strategic IT infrastructure for the dynamic data center. It is designed to deliver significant cost savings and dramatic IT simplification through its full set of infrastructure virtualization capabilities. It includes ESX Server, VMFS, Virtual SMP, VirtualCenter Management agent, VMotion technology, DRS, HA and Consolidated Backup. VMware Infrastructure Enterprise list price is $5750 per two processors.

Availability

VMware Infrastructure 3 has been in beta since October, 2005 and has had more than 6,400 active participants. VMware Infrastructure 3 will be available this month.

About VMware, Inc.

VMware, an EMC company (NYSE: EMC), 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 www.vmware.com or call 650-475-5000.

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