VMware shrinks hypervisor technology

VMware has today launched the latest version of its hypervisor technology, ESX Server that will be embedded in a range of server hardware models to make its virtualisation capabilities more reliable, secure and accessible to users.

The virtualisation market leader will be highlighting the smaller footprint, 32MB hypervisor at its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco this week, as part of its strategy to become the industry standard server virtualisation technology provider.

The vendor said, with the new VMware ESX Server 3i, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM, NEC server hardware customers among others, will be able to boot directly into its hypervisor technology in order to harness the productivity and resource savings currently available through virtualisation techniques.

"We have worked with our partners to integrate VMware ESX Server directly into their server hardware," said Raghu Raghuram, VMware vice president of products. "We expect this advance to simplify virtualisation and make it more easily accessible to customers as they refresh their computing infrastructure."

This new, 'lite' version of VMware ESX Server will also serve as an entry point to the vendor's full portfolio of products, known as VMware Infrastructure 3. The 'bare metal' hypervisor has been designed to offer the same ability to partition a physical server into multiple instances of virtual machines as its enterprise-level hypervisor, but without extra operating system functionality.

"The embedded virtualisation capabilities in VMware ESX Server 3i are complementary to the design of our HP ProLiant and BladeSystem technology," said James Mouton, senior vice president and general manager of Industry Standard Servers at HP. "This next-generation solution will help customers optimise infrastructure for manageability, simplicity and better business outcomes."

Kevin Hickman, server design solutions architect at oil and gas giant, Chevron and a VMware customer welcomed the new size and design of the 3i hypervisor. He said: "Virtualisation as part of the hardware is the wave of the future and my expectation is that in a few years everything will be virtualised."

Server hardware vendors are expected to begin shipping VMware ESX Server 3i embedded within their products by the end of 2007 and over the course of 2008. The vendor also said it would, sometime in the future, make 3i available for download by customers from its website.

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