VMware Go is a free service designed to help first-time customersmainly in the small-to-medium-size business marketget started with virtualization. The Web-based service automates the installation and configuration of VMware's freely downloadable ESXi hypervisor.SAN FRANCISCOBecause VMware only three months ago
released the latest version of its bread-and-butter productvSphere 4.0,
the so-called Cloud Operating Systemthe world's largest virtualization software maker
is turning to other news to talk about on the first day of VMworld 2009 here at Moscone
Center.
VMware on Aug. 31 launched the beta version of VMware Go, a free service
designed to help first-time customersmainly in the small-to-medium-size business marketget started
with virtualization.
The Web-based service automates the installation and configuration of
VMware's freely downloadable ESXi hypervisor, VMware ESXi.
VMware Go will enable SMB customers to "fly through the ESXi setup
process with just a few mouse clicks," Bogomil Balkansky, VMware's vice
president of product marketing for servers, told eWEEK.
VMware ESXi already claims hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, but it
is tricky to install and provision and needs a trained IT person to do
it. VMware Go is a simple, wizard-based service with templated choices
that enables a nontrained user to get up and running on virtualization in
short order, Balkansky said.
VMware Go will be made available as a beta offering on Aug. 31, 2009, to customers at a special Website. It
is scheduled to become generally available in the fourth quarter of 2009,
Balkansky said.
"SMBs stand to benefit tremendously from virtualization," said Dan
Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware.
"VMware Go will simplify virtualization for SMBs to a few easy online
steps. We want SMBs who may be sitting on the fence to realize all the benefits
of virtualization without burdening their limited IT resources."
Most industry people agree that virtualization represents the biggest sea
change in the industry since the Internet gained critical mass in the
mid-1990s. And now that this valuable software layer has attained trusted
status in most large enterprise data centers (some studies claim 85 percent
Fortune 1000 market penetration) for regular production use, the word is
spreading that smaller IT setupsmeaning anywhere from 1 to 1,000 serverscan
also take advantage.
If there is an underlying message from this show to the IT world, it's this:
Enterprises of all sizes now can share in the values
and efficiencies of using a virtualized system, and, yes, you can save
bottom-line cost and help the environmentall at the same time.
vSphere 4.0 Gets Traction with 360,000 Downloads
VMware offered an update on how the new vSphere is performing in its tests
with current users.
"By and large, vSphere is a hit with customers," Balkansky told
eWEEK. "It has been downloaded a total of 360,000 times, and based
on the poll we took, the upgrade is pretty quick. A majority of customers plan
to upgrade within the next six months.
"For this kind of infrastructure software, that's a fairly quick time
horizon."
Jeff Boles, a senior analyst and director of technology validation services
at Taneja Group, said that VMware's technological superiority with the release
of VMware vSphere 4 continues to be apparent.
"We've validated in a number of tests that VMware vSphere 4 virtualized
servers can not only run twice as many applications than other hypervisors at
equal or even greater performance levels, but also deliver much more
predictable performance," Boles said.
"Just as we've validated in the past, this VM Density metric has a
tremendous impact on cost of acquisition, and can make VMware as much as 30
percent less expensive on a per-application basis than other solutions."
Virtualization 
