VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop to the datacenter, today announced VMware ESXi has been named a SearchServerVirtualization.com 2008 Product of the Year, taking the Gold Award in the Virtualization Platforms category. VMware won top honors for providing its proven virtualization platform in a “revolutionary new embedded form factor” that can be downloaded for free, or purchased embedded in server hardware, making enterprise-grade virtualization easy to deploy for small and large companies.
TechTarget editors stated: “ESXi's tiny footprint translates into unparalleled ease of deployment; in some cases, servers ship with ESXi pre-installed, pushing the work of installing and configuring virtualization down to nothing. These days, ESXi has the added benefit of being free of charge for the standalone version, putting enterprise-grade server consolidation within reach of even the smallest IT shop. As one judge put it, ‘VMware's free ESXi leads the virtualization platform market by continuing to offer the most functionality and highest value of all the hypervisors available today.’”
The awards were presented by the SearchServerVirtualization.com editorial staff, judged in conjunction with a team of users, industry experts, analysts, and consultants. The awards were granted based on innovation, value, performance, reliability and ease of use.
“Being named a SearchServerVirtualization.com 2008 Product of the Year validates the value and rich feature-set we bring to customers with VMware ESXi,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of Server business unit, VMware. “Leveraging nine years of research and development, and tens of thousands of deployments, VMware ESXi provides unparalleled performance and scalability, serving as a powerful foundation for datacenter virtualization, application and infrastructure management and automation, and enterprise desktop virtualization.”
VMware introduced VMware ESX in 2001 as the industry’s first bare-metal hypervisor, abstracting server processor, memory, storage and networking resources into multiple virtual machines. Since then, tens of thousands of customers have used VMware ESX to simplify their infrastructures, dramatically reduce costs while improving service levels and providing cost-effective availability and disaster recovery solutions to all of their applications.
In 2007, VMware introduced ESXi, delivering the same features of ESX in an innovative new architecture; VMware ESXi is the only hypervisor that does not incorporate a general-purpose operating system, freeing it from many of the challenges involved in maintaining a general purpose operating system. It also provides unmatched security, reliability and manageability in its compact, 32 MB package, which is available embedded in server hardware, or as a free download. ESXi offers features, such as 4 virtual CPUs, 256GB hosts, and memory de-duplication, for running the most resource intensive applications. This allows ESXi to offer the highest consolidation ratios and thus the lowest total cost of ownership and cost per virtual machine. These features work equally well across the broadest set of supported operating systems in the industry, including Windows, Linux, Netware, and Solaris.
VMware ESXi is also the foundation for VMware Infrastructure 3, the industry-leading datacenter virtualization and management suite that provides centralized management, automatic load-balancing, business continuity, power management and the ability to move virtual machines across physical machines without interruption.
For more information on VMware ESXi, visit http://www.vmware.com/products/esxi/.