VMware ESX

VKernel Partners With Prosper Intelligence And The Virtualization Consolidation Academy

April 1, 2008 by Robin Wauters Leave a Comment

VKernel, a Portsmouth-based provider of virtual appliances for managing virtual server environments, announced today a partnership with Prosper Intelligence and its Virtualization Consolidation Academy. Under the agreement, Prosper Intelligence will distribute VKernel’s Suite of Virtual Appliances for managing VMware ESX environments to its network of partners and solution providers throughout Eastern and Central Europe.

From the press release:

“The VKernel Virtual Appliance Suite for Systems Management is a set of “plug-and-play” virtual appliances designed to quickly solve real world systems management challenges as organizations migrate to VMware virtual environments. VKernel products enable IT groups to immediately address today’s critical pain points by providing visibility into the capacity and resource consumption of each virtual machine. VKernel is currently offering a Chargeback Virtual Appliance for gaining cost visibility and a Capacity Analyzer Virtual Appliance for eliminating capacity bottlenecks.”

[Source: BusinessWire]

Dell Reportedly Plans To Give Away VMware ESX Server 3i For Free, World Keeps Turning

March 15, 2008 by Robin Wauters 4 Comments

According to The Inquirer, it appears Dell is considering to stop charging VMware ESX Server 3i licensing fees on its PowerEdge servers to its customers. This was reportedly said by VMWare’s Senior Product Marketing Manager Martin Niemer and comes two weeks after the virtualization vendor announced it would start embedding the 32 MB hypervisor across Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM servers.

This doesn’t come as a big surprise, as VMware had added to the previous announcement that hardware vendors would be able to choose which premium they would charge to end customers, if any. Expect the other hardware vendors to follow suit and drop the prices for including the hypervisors significantly (or even zero) if Dell comes through, especially with the sharp-priced Microsoft hypervisor Hyper-V on its way.

But don’t expect this to have a serious impact on the whole VMware reseller channel’s bottom line, as some blogs are proclaiming already. The real money is in the enterprise offering and upgrades anyway, and the smaller distributors and resellers have other advantages when it comes to SMB offerings besides pricing.

PINS Virtualizes Its Data Center With Q-layer and VMWare ESX Server

February 29, 2008 by Robin Wauters 1 Comment

PINS, a Dutch hosting and managed services provider, today announced that it has entered into a partnership with Q-layer, enabling the hosting provider to launch a Virtual Private DataCenter solution, based on Q-layer’s virtualization technology and using VMware’s ESX server technology.

With the Virtual Private DataCenter (VPDC) software from Q-layer, PINS’ customers are now able to build and manage a virtual environment including virtual servers, firewalls, switches, storage and software appliances. The virtual private datacenter comes with a “drag & drop” web interface. The Q-layer datacenter abstraction layer translates this environment into actual resources in the datacenter and executes instant provisioning using customizable workflows.

“PINS is renowned for being the first to launch winning new technology.”, said Jan Willem des Tombe, CEO of PINS, “The Q-layer Virtual Private DataCenter concept allows us to provide a new level of flexibility to our customers and partners, while leveraging the performance and stability of VMware ESX.”

From the press release:

PINS already offers web and application hosting based on VMware ESX. The VPDC offering based on Q-layer is the next step in the evolution and overcomes the complexity of automating the provisioning of the whole hosting stack including servers, network and storage. This is needed to build a real-time infrastructure.

PINS will bring the VPDC model to market in three flavors: one for end-users that require full self-service provisioning of servers and other services, one for resellers enabling them to setup server environments with the click of a button and one for managed customers where PINS engineers will build the environment for the customer.

“We are proud to have been chosen by PINS for its next-generation hosting platform.”, said Niko Nelissen, VP Business Development of Q-layer. “Both companies share a vision on how datacenter services will be operated in the future and how virtualization helps in building a real-time infrastructure with instant availability of all services”.

VMWare To Embed VMware ESX 3i Hypervisor Across Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM Servers

February 27, 2008 by Robin Wauters 2 Comments

Today at VMWorld Europe 2008 (watch our video reports), VMware announced agreements to embed the VMware ESX 3i hypervisor in servers from Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP and IBM. System providers are expected to begin shipping servers embedded with the VMware ESX 3i hypervisor within the next 60 days.

From the release:

“We are very excited to be partnering with Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, HP and IBM to proliferate virtualization and fast-track customers on the path to running a self-managing virtual datacenter,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer of VMware. “Customers can now get VMware pre-integrated and pre-configured for the hardware platform of their choice for immediate standalone server consolidation. As customers want to expand their adoption and get more value from virtualization, they can upgrade from the ESX 3i hypervisor to VMware’s complete datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3).”

“VI3 provides automatic load balancing, business continuity, power management and the ability to move a virtual machine across physical machines with no service interruption. In addition, customers who are already using VI3 can plug-and-play virtualization-enabled servers into their datacenters to dynamically and automatically expand the pool of resources (CPU, memory, and networking) available to meet their changing business requirements.”

Greene and other VMware executives highlighted the new VMware ESX 3i agreements with representatives from Dell, HP and IBM during today’s VMworld Europe general session keynote presentations. The presentations will be available via a recorded web cast (http://www.vmware.com/go/europe-webcast ) by 3:00 p.m. Central European Time and 9:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time today.