VMware’s award-winning platform vSphere 4.1 offers SMBs the most advanced capabilities for virtualized environments that can be rapidly deployed at very affordable price points.

According to an independent survey of North American and European SMB x86 server virtualization decision-makers conducted by Forrester Research 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.”

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. The announcement expands VMware’s portfolio of SMB solutions, bringing the most advanced virtualization capabilities to the broadest range of customers.

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.

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. 

VMware has the industry’s broadest and most robust virtualization partner ecosystem, with more than 25,000 technology, channel and services partners. This broad ecosystem provides SMB and Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) customers with a wide variety of servers, storage devices, networking and applications that interoperate with VMware vSphere 4.1 and are fully supported by each vendor.  In addition, VMware vCloud partners such as BlueLock and SunGard are delivering SMB business continuity and disaster recovery solutions that directly leverage public Cloud Computing services.