VMware

Upgrade to the Best Platform for Business-Critical Applications

Accelerate your application lifecycle and maximize end-user Quality of Service by running your applications on VMware Infrastructure. Test, stage, and provision your multi-tier applications quickly and efficiently to accelerate the application lifecycle. Automatically provide your applications with the right levels of scalability and availability to ensure end-user QoS. Virtualize large databases such as SQL Server, email applications such as Exchange, and enterprise application suites such as SAP and Oracle with breakthrough performance—all with the full support of hundreds of ISVs, including Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM.

Applications Need a More Dynamic Infrastructure

Application architectures are rapidly evolving towards highly distributed, loosely coupled applications. This trend is prevalent across the IT industry, including large business suites evolving towards SOA, Web 2.0 applications, and Exchange 2007 now composed of multiple server roles.

These new architectures are more responsive to business needs and allow application owners to introduce enhanced functionality with more flexibility—but they require a more agile platform to run efficiently. The conventional x86 computing model, in which applications are tightly coupled to physical servers, is too static and fragmented to effectively support these dynamic applications.

Application Lifecycle: The x86 infrastructure is often too static to support frequent application changes.

  • Testing and staging the growing volume of changes is a time-consuming and inefficient process, which requires repeated manual provisioning of application tiers in the labs.
  • Provisioning new applications onto dedicated infrastructure can take months of lead time, crippling the flexibility of these new architectures.

Application Quality of Service: Dynamic scalability and ‘always on’ availability—two fundamental business requirements—are difficult to provide on conventional infrastructure.

  • Scalability is constrained by the supporting infrastructure. Applications are not able to scale dynamically to support variable loads, and performance bottlenecks are frequent despite massive overprovisioning.
  • Availability is provided by a patchwork of application-specific solutions, increasing complexity and the risk that a single application failure could impact multiple business services.

" These days, people know that virtualization works, that’s no longer a question. The big news is really the application manageability and availability benefits associated with virtualization, and that was the major reason we invested in VMware Infrastructure. It’s not just about saving money on hardware, but also about simplifying things like application provisioning, maintenance, high availability and disaster recovery. It’s just easier to get things done with VMware. Thanks to VMware, my wife and kids see me more often. "

— Dirk Holzwarth, Team Leader, Alstom’s VMware Infrastructure

Run Your Applications on a Dynamic Platform

VMware Infrastructure is a dynamic, service-oriented platform that is ideally suited to running modern distributed applications. With VMware Infrastructure, free your applications from the constraints of static, dedicated infrastructure to:

Accelerate Application Lifecycle: Use VMware Infrastructure to test your multi-tier applications quickly and efficiently, automate your release cycles, and deploy to production in minutes, all without manual provisioning.

Maximize Quality of Service: Ensure end-user QoS by automatically providing the right levels of application availability and scalability with VMware Infrastructure’s built-in Application vServices. Application availability and scalability levels can be dialed up or down dynamically as business requirements evolve so you can meet QoS requirements in the most cost-effective way.

Deliver Breakthrough Performance: Run applications on VMware with the confidence that more than 95% of applications, including large databases, enterprise business suites, and email, will match or even exceed the performance achieved on physical servers. VMware Infrastructure has made tremendous progress in performance capabilities over the latest product generations, and performance constraints such as IO limitations and virtualization overhead are a thing of the past.

Enjoy a Rapidly Expanding ISV Ecosystem: The ecosystem of ISVs fully supporting their applications on ESX is expanding rapidly. Three of the four largest ISVs, including Microsoft, SAP, and IBM Software Group, now provide the same level of application support on ESX as on physical servers. Hundreds of ISVs have provided official support statements for ESX, recognizing the value that VMware brings to their customers and internal operational processes.