Davey Winder
Tuesday, 29 July 2008 03:52
Business IT -
Technology
Page 1 of 2
Virtualisation is certainly one of the hot technologies of the moment, and VMware is certainly at the top of the vendor tree. Today it announced a grand plan to help cement that position in the face of emerging competition from the likes of Microsoft: giving away its number one Hypervisor product for free...
According to VMware the
stand-alone ESXi hypervisor will
immediately become available at no cost to companies of all
size. Although obviously the intention is to attract the smaller
companies with smaller budgets in order to introduce them to the
advantages of virtualisation.
“VMware has always believed that virtualization
needs to be ubiquitous. We want to accelerate the day that x86 servers
and desktops are fully virtualized,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice
president of products and solutions, VMware. “With the explosive growth
of multi-core capacity, improvements in virtualization-aware hardware,
and performance improvements in our virtualization software, we believe
that no technical hurdles remain for 100% virtualization. Now we are
removing financial hurdles as well."
VMware has been in the hypervisor business since 2001, and has in
excess of 120,000 customers which, the company claims, makes it the
industry’s "most popular and reliable" hypervisor product. The ESXi
version was launched towards the end of 2007, and represents the
third-generation of VMware hypervisor.
So this is actually a real opportunity to get a current and valid
hypervisor for free, rather than some dated and soon to be discontinued
nonsense as you many might have expected. Leading server manufacturers
such as Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP, IBM and NEC have all embedded VMware
ESXi.
Indeed, VMware even announced the ESXi 3.5 update 2 version today,
which has the smallest industry footprint and meets the criteria for
mass distribution in that it has been battle tested for six months to
ensure stability and maturity.
What does Gartner have to say about the free hypervisor, and where do
Microsoft and Citrix fit into the market puzzle? Read page 2 to find
out...
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