Why Virtual Appliances
VMware partners are making their products available in virtual appliances for many reasons, but in general, virtual appliances deliver on the classical promise of disruptive technologies: Faster, Better, Cheaper.
As software vendors explore strategies to leverage the rapid growth of server virtualization and customer interest in cloud computing, virtual appliances serve as an “on ramp” to new sales, distribution and licensing models. Whether an appliance is intended to be a platform for demonstrating software, a commercial product, or a demo that can easily be activated as a fully-featured product after purchasing an appropriate license, VMware partners are developing ready-to-run virtual machines that are easy for customers to download, commission and run.
The expanding VMware installed base provides a universally compatible platform for theses products. Further, the recent Gartner, Inc.'s X86 Virtualization Server Magic Quadrant positions VMware in the Leader’s Quadrant. VMware partners can be confident in making VMware their platform of choice in any move to the cloud.
What’s a VMware Ready Virtual Appliance?
Software appliances aren’t a new idea. Technology vendors have packaged specialized systems on dedicated commodity hardware to deliver high-value functionality such as storage, networking and security for many years. Standardizing the product and taking installation and basic configuration out of the hands of the end user increased reliability and reduced installation time and support costs. It also raised the cost of the product. This is acceptable for high-cost products, but software vendors seeking a lower price point can’t easily take advantage of the traditional appliance model.
Appliances built on virtual machines changed the game entirely. Any software product can easily be pre-packaged and delivered in a virtual machine, and can run anywhere that a compatible hypervisor is available. End users skip hardware and operating system preparation, and can usually ignore device compatibility. The software can be installed and in use in minutes, and can easily provide a complete demonstration configuration.
Anyone can build a VMware-compatible virtual appliance. There are no licenses required, and the tools that help with configuration are all free from VMware or available from other vendors. Many vendors choose to build and deliver appliances in partnership with VMware, taking advantage of the VMware Ready logo program and the VMware VMware Solution Exchange. By packaging a VMware Ready qualified product in a VMware qualified virtual appliance, partners take advantage of preferred exposure and the highest standard of VMware partnership.
A VMware Ready Virtual Appliance begins with qualifying a VMware Ready product. Members of VMware’s Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program can download the VMware Ready Program Guide and begin testing their product for this qualification. After approval for the VMware Ready logo, the base software product is built as a Virtual Appliance to VMware Virtual Appliance requirements using VMware Studio or an equivalent product. Following successful evaluation of the appliance by VMware, the appliance will be listed on the VMware VMware Solution Exchange with the VMware Ready logo designation.
The VMware Ready logo qualification is not required to develop a virtual appliance, but it provides the highest level and endorsement and visibility from VMware. Listing a product in the VMware Ready program is strongly recommended as an incremental step to successfully marketing an appliance. You can find VMware Ready Virtual Appliances on the VMware Solution Exchange.
Who Delivers VMware Ready Virtual Appliances?
VMware partners ranging from technology specialists to industry heavyweights deliver their software products as VMware Ready Virtual Appliances. Some have extensive experience with hardware-based products. Other have developed appliances based on their software products.
VMware is proud to feature several partners that have strategically moved to qualify their products to the VMware Ready standard and to make them available as VMware Ready Virtual Appliances.
" Virtual appliances are great for us to deliver superior consolidation value. We deliver market leading WAN Optimization with all other branch IT needs for the most flexible, highly available, cost-efficient and consolidated branch office. Virtual appliances gave us leverage to deliver subscription based pricing models."
— Shreyas Sadalgi, Director, Business Development
Blue Coat Systems
Blue Coat Systems provides Application Performance Monitoring, WAN Optimization and Secure Web Gateway technologies to more than 15,000 customers worldwide, including 81% of the Fortune® Global 500.
The Blue Coat ProxySG Virtual Appliance (VA) delivers Blue Coat’s market leading WAN Optimization on industry standard servers. It allows customers the ability to consolidate all branch office needs, while accelerating application performance and reducing networking costs for files, email, backup – as well as video, web and SaaS application. VMware-ready means Blue Coat is part of the most cost efficient, flexible and WAN-optimized branch office architecture.
Learn more about Blue Coat Systems ProxySG
" Symantec customers have embraced our virtual appliance offering, with over 30% of customers now running on VMware. Virtualization allows customers to consolidate their infrastructure, increase hardware utilization, deploy resources dynamically, and streamline the management and upkeep of their mission-critical messaging security infrastructure."
— Deaddin Edris, Product Marketing Manager
Symantec Brightmail
The Symantec Brightmail Family delivers inbound and outbound messaging security with effective and accurate anti-spam and anti-virus protection, and complete messaging security features. The Brightmail Family is part of Symantec’s comprehensive information security portfolio.
The Symantec Brightmail Gateway delivers inbound and outbound messaging security, with effective and accurate real-time antispam and antivirus protection, advanced content filtering, data loss prevention, and email encryption. It catches more than 99% of spam with less than one in a million false positives, leveraging real-time automatic updates, global and local IP reputation analysis, and comprehensive reporting to deliver cost-effective protection against new messaging threats.
Learn more about Symantec Brightmail
" The virtual edition of BIG-IP LTM is an important component of F5’s overall solution. It enables users to easily download and evaluate the product, it empowers developers to code and test their application infrastructure without dedicated hardware, and it gives customers greater flexibility in architecting their application delivery networking infrastructure."
— Jason Needham, Sr. Director, Product Management
f5 Networks
F5 Networks provides solutions that make applications secure, fast, and available for everyone, helping organizations get the most out of their investment. By adding intelligence and manageability into the network to offload applications, F5 optimizes applications and allows them to work faster and consume fewer resources.
The F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition provides the same industry leading Application Delivery capabilities as the physical BIG-IP, but with the flexibility of a virtual deployment model. Organizations now have the freedom to combine physical & virtual LTMs in an integrated application delivery architecture for optimal efficiency, scalability, and reliability. LTM-VE is compatible with all advanced vSphere functions, and comes with the same support as the rest of F5's products.
Learn more about F5 BIG-IP Local Traffic Manager Virtual Edition
" For NETASQ it is very significant to be officially part of the VMWare Alliance Program, in order to guarantee IT directors that NETASQ Virtual Security Appliances are fully compliant to the worldwide leader in Virtualization. The numerous benefits of virtualized environments are clearly understood, and we see a strong demand for virtualized Enterprise servers. One of the challenges to a successful implementation can be the difficulty to find the right level of expertise at the reseller level in terms of knowledge of virtualized infrastructure and security. For that reason, NETASQ strongly encourages its own resellers to be VMWare certified, and is addressing the security skills required by our resellers"
— Dominique MEURISSE, Executive Vice President ,Sales and Marketing of NETASQ
NETASQ
NETASQ is one of the leading European network security vendors and has sold over 55,000 products worldwide via a distribution channel of 750 partners in 40 countries. Customers range from SMB to large private and public organizations. As computing threats grow more prevalent, dangerous and diverse NETASQ continues to develop innovative solutions to protect our customers’ data, their communications and their network.
Unified Threat Management (UTM) is the evolution of the traditional firewall into an all-inclusive security product that has the ability to perform multiple security functions in one single appliance: network firewalling, network intrusion prevention and gateway antivirus (AV), gateway anti-spam, VPN, content filtering, load balancing and risk assessment.
NETASQ appliances address UTM and integrate the security features which meet the needs of service providers, remote users and businesses of all sizes. NETASQ Virtual Appliances deliver the same UTM features as their hardware counterparts. 3 licenses are available: NETASQ Virtual Appliance for SMB, NETASQ Virtual Appliance for Enterprise, and NETASQ Virtual Appliance for Servers. On top of all UTM features, NETASQ Virtual Appliance for Servers include NETASQ Risk assessment tool (SEISMO).
" With a virtual machine, NetEx can effectively sell a highly technical product in a fool-proof, easy to deploy package. We use this flexibility in multiple directions: nearly instantaneous service, more finely tuned pricing, or high-impact marketing through real-world demonstration product. A virtual machine also allows us to instantaneously upgrade customers on the fly with performance scalability up to 800Mbs with no change to their existing hardware infrastructure. These things aren’t just hard to do and very expensive when you’re constrained to physical hardware – they’re impossible. Virtual appliances are a powerful tool for us."
— Robert MacIntyre, VP Business Development & Marketing
NetEx
For over 25 years, hundreds of companies and government agencies have relied on NetEx for mission critical data transfer needs. Their experience working with small, medium and enterprise companies and supporting their partners enables NetEx to accelerate and optimize industry-leading business continuity and disaster recovery applications on a global basis.
HyperIP is an affordable and simple to install virtual appliance that operates on VMware virtual infrastructure. HyperIP accelerates TCP-based data replication and file transfer applications operating over IP WANs. It is based on technology which is deployed at many demanding global organizations to replicate (or move) their mission-critical business information regardless of distance. WAN optimization provides significant value to VMware Infrastructure applications including VMotion and SRM as well as data replication and backup applications by mitigating network issues that degrade overall application throughput and performance over the WAN.
Learn more about NetEx HyperIP
