Sun Microsystems has announced an alliance with VMware designed to deliver the latter's full line of server virtualisation capabilities on Sun's Sun Fire x64 (x86, 64-bit) servers and the Sun StorEdge 6920 system, further supporting deployment of a virtual data centre.
In addition, Sun and VMware also signed a technology agreement to provide support for the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS) as a guest on future VMware server and desktop products.
In terms of these agreements, Sun will resell VMware ESX Server, VMware GSX Server and VMware Workstation products, providing customers purchasing Sun Fire x64 servers or workstations from Sun, such as the single- and dual-core Sun Fire V20z and Sun Fire V40z, with the option of adding the virtualisation software to their systems. VMware ESX Server is virtual infrastructure software for partitioning, consolidating and managing systems in mission-critical environments.
With VMware ESX Server on Sun Fire x64 servers and support for the Solaris OS, IT organisations can extend their options to easily provision new services running on the Solaris 10 OS, Windows and standard Linux distribution operating systems on the same piece of hardware, thus helping to increase utilisation of the servers.
VMware customers will be able to take advantage of key features of Solaris 10, including Solaris Dynamic Tracing (Dtrace) and Solaris Containers on any architecture. With technology advances such as enhancements to the network stack and special optimisations for multithreaded x64/x86 architectures, Solaris 10 is powering enterprise applications at record speeds on Sun Fire systems.
In addition, the Sun StorEdge 6920 system, Sun's flagship mid-tier storage system, complements VMware ESX Server by enabling customers to implement cost-effective consolidation initiatives and robust business continuity capabilities.
"Virtualisation opens the network and liberates the customer to implement server consolidation, respond faster with virtual infrastructure and dramatically improve and lower the cost of disaster recovery," said Stephen Borcich, vice-president of Partner Marketing for Sun Microsystems, Inc. "VMware virtual infrastructure on Sun Fire servers further extends the options for customers to consolidate the servers and storage in their data centres with Sun's high performance Sun Fire x64 and StorEdge 6920 products. Furthermore, with the addition of Solaris support, customers will be able to run Solaris 10 in a VMware virtual machine."
Enterprises in many industries typically run one application service on one server, and often utilise only 5% to 15% of their Linux or Windows server hardware capability. With virtual infrastructure, IT organisations can provision new services, change the amount of resources dedicated to a software service easily and consolidate disparate systems, such as branch office and data centre mission-critical applications and infrastructures, onto fewer highly scalable, reliable enterprise-class servers from the Sun Fire x64 product line, powered by the AMD Opteron processor.
"Today an increasing number of our 10 000 enterprise customers are standardising on VMware virtual infrastructure for their industry standard servers to take advantage of the indisputable productivity, flexibility and cost saving benefits of virtualisation technology," said Brian Byun, vice-president of Strategic Alliances for VMware. "Our new relationship with Sun Microsystems, a proven and established data centre vendor, will expand customers' options for creating their virtualised data centres. Enterprises that are evaluating new approaches to managing IT resources should consider the combination of Sun Fire x64 servers running Solaris 10 and VMware ESX Server."
VMware ESX server is available immediately on Sun's Sun Fire x64 servers directly from Sun and other qualified resellers.
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