VMware has announced the general availability of VMware
Server after a five-month beta programme with more than 700,000
downloads.
Customers deploying the free-hosted virtualisation product for
Linux and Windows servers can now buy enterprise-class support from
VMware. In addition, they can now use VMware VirtualCenter to
centrally provision, monitor and manage VMware Server
deployments.
VMware says that users can progress from its eponymous server
product to VMware Infrastructure 3, the third generation of the
infrastructure virtualisation software suite that allows
industry-standard infrastructure farms to be managed as a shared
utility and dynamically allocated to different business units or
projects.
The suite is designed to deliver virtualisation, management,
resource optimisation, application availability and operational
automation capabilities in an integrated offering.
VMware says that its Infrastructure solution is used by more
than 20,000 companies worldwide, of which more than 90% are running
it in production server environments and 25% are choosing to
standardise their industry-standard systems on it.
The company says that its server products offer capabilities
such as the ability to run on standard x86 hardware; support for
64-bit guest operating systems, including Linux, Windows, NetWare
and Solaris; support for VMware VirtualCenter to efficiently
provision, monitor and manage infrastructure from a central
management console; ‘experimental’ support for 2-Way Virtual SMP,
enabling a single virtual machine to span multiple physical
processors; and the ability to run on a wider variety of Linux and
Windows host and guest operating systems than any server
virtualisation product on the market.