VMware Offers Discount On vSphere Essentials

Virtualisation solutions specialist VMware announced it is offering its VMware vSphere Essentials product package at up to 50 percent off the list price through June 15, 2010, though the company noted prices may vary if purchased through resellers or in different regions. vSphere Essentials delivers virtualisation capabilities that help enable small to medium-size businesses (SMBs) to consolidate and manage application workloads while reducing hardware and operating costs. Through this promotion, VMware will offer SMBs virtualisation starting at less than $500 (£330).

VMware offers a range of solutions for SMBs that help make server virtualisation, centralised management, high availability and data protection affordable. The company pitches vSphere Essentials as ideal for businesses with fewer than 20 physical servers, and the company noted customers could upgrade the scale and functionality of the product at any time.

Timothy Stephan, senior director of product marketing for VMware, said vSphere allows SMBs to do more with less. “We’ve helped thousands of SMB customers more effectively utilise their storage, network and computing resources to control costs and respond more quickly to business demand,” he said. “With this promotion, we are happy to make the benefits of virtualisation more affordable for offices of all sizes.”

Stephen said vSphere helps small businesses protect critical data and applications that keep the company running with zero-downtime hardware maintenance and enables small businesses to test and deploy more applications by optimising pre-production staging environments, resulting in less downtime for the applications that run and drive the business.

Designed for small IT environments with fewer than 20 physical servers, the Essentials and Essentials Plus editions of vSphere 4 includes features such as ESX and ESXi which provide a virtualisation layer that allows multiple virtual machines to share the computing, networking and storage resources of a single physical server and vCenter Server for Essentials, which provides provisioning, centralised management and performance monitoring, with physical-to-virtual (P2V) machine conversion, wizard-based deployment and other features.

Also included is VMware’s High Availability (HA), which provides hardware-independent failover for virtual machines on ESX hosts and Data Recovery, which provides agentless backup and recovery for virtual machines that helps optimise backup storage usage and complements existing data protection solutions for backup and archival to tape. Integrated network security and firewall protection for virtual machines, VMsafe security APIs for third-party security products, role-based access control and integration with Microsoft Active Directory and SSL encryption for secure remote access to ESX and ESXi hosts round out the package.