Centralized Management for VMware Server

A: VirtualCenter for VMware Server provides centralized management of VMware Servers at an attractive price point for small and medium businesses.

VirtualCenter for VMware Server addresses the critical challenges that SMBs face today when managing their IT infrastructure — how to:

• Increase the utilization of existing servers and contain the purchase of new ones.
• Enable rapid server provisioning.
• Provide centralized management of their virtual IT environment from a single interface.

A: VirtualCenter for VMware Server provides tremendous business benefits to customers and allows them to lower the cost and complexity of their IT Infrastructure. VirtualCenter for VMware Server can be used to:

• Increase server utilization – create multiple virtual machines on a single physical server. Enables IT teams to increase the workload carried by existing physical servers – typically from <10% to upwards of 80% utilization.

• Rapidly provision – reduce server provisioning time from hours/days to minutes, allowing administrators to respond more immediately to requests for IT services. Using server templates, administrators can ensure that new servers are fully consistent with current build and security policies.

• Centralize IT management – enables organizing, monitoring, and configuring of the entire IT environment through a single interface. Improves responsiveness to business needs by using task scheduling and alerting capabilities.

• Monitor performance – analyze the performance of physical servers and the virtual machines they are running with detailed utilization graphs of CPU, memory, Disk I/O, and Network I/O.

A: VirtualCenter for VMware Server is VirtualCenter 1.4 that is licensed to work exclusively with VMware Server. It will not work with VMware ESX 3. The bundle includes the VirtualCenter Management Server, 3 VirtualCenter Agents, and 2 support incidents, and is priced at $1,500.

A: Virtualization has a tremendous opportunity to solve important problems for small and medium businesses. Recent market data highlights that ‘optimizing the use of technology assets’ is one of the top technology concerns for SMBs today. VMware’s solutions significantly address this need today.

Overall adoption of virtualization solutions by SMB is behind that of large enterprises, but is picking up steam. As of January, 2007, over 1.2 million copies of VMware Server have been downloaded, with approximately 70% coming from small and medium businesses. As these customers deploy an environment of virtual machines, they need the ability to more efficiently manage these IT assets. This is where VirtualCenter for VMware Server fits in.

A: Virtual machines created in VMware Server are compatible with VMware Infrastructure. VMware provides tools such as the new VMware Converter to facilitate this migration. The process would be to purchase and install VMware ESX on a new hardware box and then to migrate the virtual machines using Virtual Machine Importer or VMware Converter.

A: VirtualCenter for VMware Server is sold as a bundle, which includes the VirtualCenter Management Server, 3 VirtualCenter Agents, and 2 support incidents, and is priced at $1,500. The components are also sold individually.