VMware, a provider of virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, on Tuesday introduced new VMware vSphere 4.1 solutions for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) with prices starting at $83 per processor. VMware's award-winning platform offers SMBs the most advanced capabilities for virtualized environments that can be rapidly deployed at very affordable price points.

VMware also announced the availability of VMware vSphere 4.1, with key performance and efficiency enhancements for virtualization and cloud computing environments.

According to an independent survey of North American and European SMB x86 server virtualization decision-makers conducted by Forrester Research, Inc., 74% of the virtualized environments in those SMBs surveyed utilize VMware technologies. In the same survey, "60% of SMBs rated standardizing on virtualization for server deployment, disaster recovery, business continuity capabilities, and infrastructure consolidation as a high or critical priority."(1)

Small and midsize businesses represent the fastest growing segment of VMware's customer base. In the last two years alone, VMware has tripled the number of customers in the SMB segment by introducing solutions and services aimed specifically at this market. VMware vSphere delivers the most complete virtualization offering for businesses of all sizes. Today's announcement expands VMware's portfolio of SMB solutions, bringing the most advanced virtualization capabilities to the broadest range of customers.

"VMware High Availability, Fault Tolerance and Data Recovery give us peace of mind because we know that our critical applications and data are protected and always available on demand -- even during hardware failure," said Max Herring, senior system administrator, Campbell Clinic. "With VMware vSphere, we can easily build an enterprise quality disaster recovery environment at a price point we can afford."

"Small and midsize businesses face similar IT challenges as large enterprises," said Bogomil Balkansky, vice president, product marketing, Virtualization and Cloud Platforms, VMware. "Solving these challenges requires innovative technologies that deliver cloud-like IT services such as high availability, effective disaster recovery and simplified management. But unlike large enterprises, SMBs have less legacy and organizational complexity, giving them the freedom to adopt emerging technologies more rapidly and quickly achieve significant benefits. By combining more than a decade of proven virtualization expertise with pricing and packaging appropriate for SMBs, VMware delivers a unique set of solutions that helps SMBs accelerate the journey to IT as a Service -- delivering enterprise-class functionality while enabling the scalability needed to support the needs of a growing business."

Award-Winning Virtualization for SMBs
With the release of VMware vSphere 4.1, VMware has enhanced its virtualization portfolio for SMBs, bringing advanced capabilities to this market segment and introducing new price points:

• VMware vMotion now included in VMware vSphere 4.1 Essentials Plus and Standard editions. VMware vMotion delivers the most advanced live migration capability, enabling customers to rapidly migrate virtual machines across hardware environments without interrupting business operations. Live migration allows customers to effectively consolidate physical systems and utilize resource pools by moving workloads to the optimal environment. vMotion is in use in over 70% of VMware vSphere customers. For the first time, VMware is making this capability available in the VMware vSphere Essentials Plus and Standard editions, targeted for SMB customers. In vSphere 4.1, vMotion is enhanced to deliver a 5X increase in migration speed while supporting up to eight simultaneous migrations.
• New, lower price for VMware vSphere 4.1 Essentials. The most popular VMware vSphere kit for businesses with fewer than 30 applications, VMware vSphere 4.1 Essentials provides an all-in-one solution for small businesses at $495 for six processors, approximately $83 per processor.
• ESXi rebranded as VMware vSphere Hypervisor, still available at no cost. VMware vSphere Hypervisor (formerly ESXi single server edition) delivers the proven foundation of VMware's virtualization technology to customers of all sizes at no cost. Composed of the same underlying hypervisor architecture as the entire VMware vSphere product portfolio, VMware vSphere Hypervisor enables customers to rapidly implement production virtualization environments to take advantage of server consolidation, cost savings and reduced power and cooling consumption. VMware vSphere Hypervisor has been rapidly adopted by the market and has been proven to run even the most resource-intensive applications with the highest performance. The free solution provides a rapidly deployed platform to begin adopting virtualization across the organization.