VMware with AMD, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Red Hat and Others to Forge Open Virtualization Standards
VMware Opens Up VMware ESX Server Source Code to Partners to Accelerate Virtualization Solutions for Customers
PALO ALTO, Calif., August 8, 2005 – VMware, the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, today announced that it is working with industry leaders AMD, BEA Systems, BMC Software, Broadcom, Cisco, Computer Associates International, Dell, Emulex, HP, IBM, Intel, Mellanox, Novell, QLogic and Red Hat to advance open virtualization standards. This effort is open to vendors that share a common goal of accelerating the adoption of open standards for virtualization. VMware will contribute technologies based on its seven years of extensive innovation and market leadership to this standards development effort.
In addition, VMware announced that it will provide its partners access to VMware ESX Server source code and interfaces under a new program called VMware Community Source. This program is designed to empower partners to influence the direction of VMware ESX Server through a collaborative development model and shared governance process.
"Virtualization is gaining widespread adoption due to its indisputable customer benefits. It is an area rich in opportunities and the ecosystem will develop most fully with open standards. VMware is thus taking our industry-leading products, opening up the APIs and providing shared governance and source access to them," said Diane Greene, President of VMware. "We look forward to this next phase of increased partner collaboration and believe it is the best possible way to give customers the ability to realize the full potential of the x86 virtualization layer."
These initiatives are intended to benefit customers by creating:
- Expanded ecosystem of virtualization solutions: the availability of open standard virtualization interfaces and the collaborative nature of VMware Community Source is intended to accelerate the availability of new virtualization solutions.
- Expanded interoperability and supportability: standard interfaces for hypervisors are expected to enable interoperability for customers with heterogeneous virtualized environments.
- Accelerated availability of new virtualization-aware technologies: vendors across the technology stack can optimize existing technologies and introduce new technologies for running in virtual environments.
"Guardian Life Insurance has standardized on VMware ESX Server for our Wintel environment across the organization," said Bob Mathers, Second Vice President of Infrastructure and Disaster Recovery at Guardian Life Insurance Company. "Using VMware we have consolidated and deployed hundreds of virtual machines throughout our environment realizing lower TCO, more efficient disaster recovery, rapid server provisioning, flexible zero-downtime workload migration and server containment. We are excited to see VMware's leadership in bringing together all the leading infrastructure vendors to drive their proprietary innovation in concert with VMware virtual infrastructure technology."
"This is a very exciting development," said Martin Wickham, CIO for BT Ireland. "Standardizing on VMware virtual infrastructure in our test and production environments is yielding many benefits, including reduced costs, more efficient disaster recovery and instant server provisioning as well as providing a key component in the creation of a 'utility' based infrastructure. We are pleased that VMware continues to innovate by working with other vendors for industry standardization because it will further enrich the platform and its integration with a broad array of application software. I look forward to the future developments."
Open Hypervisor Standards:Hypervisors are the foundational component of virtual infrastructure and enable computer system partitioning. An open standard hypervisor framework can benefit customers by enabling innovation across an ecosystem of interoperable virtualization vendors and solutions.
As an initial step, VMware will contribute an existing framework of interfaces, called Virtual Machine Hypervisor Interfaces (VMHI), based on its commercially successful virtualization products to facilitate the development of these standards in an industry neutral manner. Consistent adoption of open interfaces is expected to facilitate interoperability and supportability across heterogeneous virtualized environments.
Community Source: The Community Source program provides industry partners with an opportunity to access VMware ESX Server source code under a royalty-free license. Partners are empowered to contribute shared code or create binary modules intended to spur and extend interoperable and integrated virtualization solutions —thereby combining the best of both the traditional commercial and open source development models. Community members can participate and influence the governance of VMware ESX Server through an architecture board. This approach will help drive open collaboration while still preserving the ability of partners to build differentiated, intellectual property-protected solutions.
For customers, the VMware Community Source program is expected to yield a richer and broader set of partner solutions that are well integrated with VMware virtual infrastructure products. For partners, the source access and development model allows them to efficiently deliver complementary solutions or differentiated product capabilities around the VMware ESX Server code base.
"Virtualization is a game-changing technology for the data center, and we expect VMware's open collaboration to help foster a broad set of well-integrated commercial solutions for AMD Opteron processor-based systems," said Joe Menard, Corporate Vice President of Software Strategy at AMD. "VMware has significant market experience, focusing on robust and accelerated support for AMD's 'Pacifica' specification. We support VMware's lead in offering API's to further drive market adoption of virtualization. As a founder of the HyperTransport Consortium, founding member of the Trusted Computing Group and leader in defining x86-based 64-bit computing, AMD is a huge proponent of customer freedom and we support open standards for virtualization."
"Cisco is committed to bringing the benefits of best-in-class data center virtualization solutions to our customers," said Jayshree Ullal, Senior Vice President, Datacenter, Switching and Security Technology Group, Cisco. "By fostering the creation of open virtualization standards we can better deliver our customers complete end-to-end data center solutions that take advantage of the natural synergy between VMware's virtual machine capabilities and the end-to-end physical server, storage, security, I/O virtualization, and VFrame virtualization management capabilities Cisco offers across our portfolio of data center switching infrastructure."
"Standardization brings benefits to the entire industry," said Jeff Clarke, Senior Vice President of Dell's Product Group. "Dell continually innovates around standards to deliver on our Scalable Enterprise vision with products and services that help customers better utilize computing resources and keep costs low. We applaud VMware for opening its APIs to standardization to promote interoperability and flexibility in customer computing environments."
"Virtualization is about making IT resources changeable matching IT supply to business demand, which is key to becoming an Adaptive Enterprise, where business and IT are synchronized to capitalize on change," said Rick Becker, Vice President and General Manager of HP BladeSystem. "HP and VMware are committed to simplifying a user's IT infrastructure through consolidation and migration to the latest evolution in industry standard solutions. Through our collaboration with VMware in the Community Source Program and our joint efforts across our servers, management tools, storage solutions, consulting and support, we are helping enterprise customers drive down IT costs, increase business agility and free up resources for innovation."
"In keeping with IBM's strong track record of combining innovation with open technologies, IBM welcomes the opportunity to collaborate with VMware and other industry participants to bring open standards to the virtualization marketplace and foster a closer integration between the two companies technologies," said Susan Whitney, General Manager of xSeries Division in IBM Systems and Technology Group. "The combination of VMware virtual infrastructure and IBM xSeries virtualization and management will bring flexibility, scale and simplicity to enterprise data centers. IBM intends to work with VMware to explore xSeries virtualized solutions based on an open API environment."
"The combination of today's virtualization software solutions with Intel Virtualization Technology will help drive improvements to the reliability and resilience of enterprise servers and enable impactful new uses for industry-standard PCs and notebooks," said Renee J. James, Intel Vice President and General Manager of the Software and Solutions Group. "Intel looks forward to working with VMware to bring out open virtualization APIs and supporting implementations that maximize Intel's hardware innovations. Businesses and consumers stand to benefit greatly from the interoperability and broad adoption resulting from standardization of this critical software technology."
"Supporting and working with key enterprise platforms like VMware virtual infrastructure is what sets Novell apart as a global data center infrastructure vendor," said David Patrick, Vice President and General Manager, Linux, Open Source Platforms and Services Group, Novell. "We are seeing strong adoption of VMware's proven, highly performant data center virtual infrastructure across Novell and SUSE LINUX customers, and we believe that VMware's commitment to open technology and common standards for virtualization will benefit the industry and customers alike."
"More than ever standards are critical to innovation in enterpriseinfrastructures. Red Hat applauds the efforts of technology partners like VMware who are working to establish open, standards-based solutions," said Paul Cormier, Executive Vice President of Engineering at Red Hat. "We are pleased to work with VMware, partners and the community to offer customers virtualization as a key component of their open source architectures."
Open Hypervisor Standards:Collaboration around open hypervisor standards is expected to focus on the following areas of interoperability and performance optimization for virtualized environments:
- Cross-platform frameworks that govern the standardized operation and management of standalone virtual machine environments as well as highly dynamic, data center-scale deployment of virtualized systems.
- Co-operative virtualization APIs between hypervisors and guest operating systems.
- Virtual machine formats that enable virtual machine migration and recovery across platforms.
More information about VMware proposals for VMHI is available at www.vmware.com/standards/.
More about Community Source: Vendors interested in becoming VMware Community Source members can find more information at www.vmware.com/communitysource/.
About VMware, Inc.
VMware, an EMC company (NYSE: EMC), is the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems. The world's largest companies use VMware solutions to simplify their IT, fully leverage their existing computing investments and respond faster to changing business demands. VMware is based in Palo Alto, California. For more information, visit www.vmware.com or call 650-475-5000.
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VMware is a registered trademark of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or various jurisdictions. All other trademarks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. This release contains "forward-looking statements" as defined under the Federal Securities Laws. Actual results could differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of certain risk factors, including but not limited to: (i) adverse changes in general economic or market conditions; (ii) delays or reductions in information technology spending; (iii) risks associated with acquisitions and investments, including the challenges and costs of integration, restructuring and achieving anticipated synergies; (iv) competitive factors, including but not limited to pricing pressures and new product introductions; (v) the relative and varying rates of product price and component cost declines and the volume and mixture of product and services revenues; (vi) component and product quality and availability; (vii) the transition to new products, the uncertainty of customer acceptance of new product offerings and rapid technological and market change; (viii) insufficient, excess or obsolete inventory; (ix) war or acts of terrorism; (x) the ability to attract and retain highly qualified employees; (xi) fluctuating currency exchange rates; and (xii) other one-time events and other important factors disclosed previously and from time to time in EMC's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EMC and VMware disclaim any obligation to update any such forward-looking statements after the date of this release.
ADDITIONAL PARTNER QUOTES:
"Customers tell us that driving IT efficiency through virtualization is a strategic imperative and close interoperability is key," said Guy Churchward, General Manager of JRockit Product Group at BEA Systems. "It is great to see companies like VMware offer flexibility to innovate around open technology initiatives. As part of BEA's utility computing and virtualization strategy, it's important for the company to work closely with enterprise class components, such as VMware's virtual infrastructure, to meet customers' needs. Companies like VMware help further our goal to provide highly differentiated value to global customers."
"As a leader in virtualization, BMC Software has already introduced comprehensive management solutions for VMware virtual infrastructure software, including monitoring, capacity management and optimization with BMC PATROL Performance Assurance for Virtual Servers and BMC Performance Manager for Virtual Servers," said Tom Bishop, Chief Technology Officer at BMC Software. "These solutions help customers make dynamic provisioning decisions from a business perspective to achieve Business Service Management. BMC is looking forward to supporting VMware's open virtualization initiative to drive key integrations and common interfaces that advance innovation and manageability for the broad range of enterprise customers who are adopting VMware virtual infrastructure."
"Broadcom is committed to convergence over Ethernet by driving C-NIC technology as the baseline function for the coming generation of servers," said Greg Young, Vice President and General Manager of Broadcom's High-Speed Controller Line of Business. "As the industry adoption of server virtualization increases, we are excited to be working with industry pioneer VMware to drive optimized integration and support for Broadcom converged NICs with VMware ESX Server."
"Our customers are expanding the use of virtual technologies in their data centers," according to Sam Greenblatt, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Advisor at Computer Associates International. "CA has a long history of helping customers leverage these systems, which run the gamut from classic mainframes to more recent innovations on commodity platforms. Working with VMware under the Community Source program will be an important step toward identifying standards that will make virtualized environments even more significant in deploying IT assets in the enterprise."
"Emulex is working closely with VMware to bring to market and support enterprise-class virtualization solutions via the VMware Community Source program. The Emulex HBA architecture is uniquely flexible and features industry-standard APIs to ensure seamless compatibility with industry-leading virtualization solutions, such as VMware ESX Server," said Mike Smith, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Emulex. "As a leading contributor to community development initiatives, we expect VMware's Community Source program to provide the open framework and flexibility required for maximizing server and storage management, while ensuring deployment of fully interoperable solutions to our mutual customers."
"Mellanox looks forward to leveraging the source code that VMware is opening up through the Community Source initiative," said Eyal Waldman, CEO of Mellanox. "Mellanox is leading the industry in advancing Infiniband technology and driving the incorporation of Infiniband technology and optimizations into VMware virtual infrastructure for the 10,000+ enterprise customers running VMware in their data centers."
"Virtualization technology will be important in terms of improving total cost of ownership, manageability, dynamic workload optimization, zero-downtime maintenance and rapid provisioning," said Prem Kumar, Vice President of Server Technologies at Oracle. "Oracle is supportive of VMware opening up their technology and believes this will drive greater innovation for virtualization technology overall."
"QLogic sees increasing customer adoption of VMware virtual infrastructure with QLogic Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks," said Roger Klein, Vice President of Product Marketing, QLogic. "We are excited to work with VMware under the Community Source umbrella to add value to VMware ESX Server and deliver jointly optimized solutions to our customers."