VMware to Add Support for Paravirtualized Linux and Solaris x86 Operating Systems
Market Leader Gives Customers Broadest Choice of Supported Operating Systems
SAN FRANCISCO and PALO ALTO, Calif., August 10, 2005 — Today at LinuxWorld, VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, announced plans to support paravirtualized Linux and Solaris x86 operating systems in future releases of VMware virtual infrastructure platform products – Workstation, GSX Server and ESX Server. With support for more than 60 x86-based operating systems, VMware platform products support the industry’s broadest set of operating systems. This broad support gives customers more choice when using virtualization to lower the cost of managing multiple operating system environments.
VMware is adding support for paravirtualized Linux operating systems as they become adopted in commercial operating system distributions across its virtual infrastructure platform products. Paravirtualized Linux operating systems are modified operating systems that are specifically optimized to run in a virtual environment. This gives customers the choice of running both unmodified and paravirtualized operating systems, with or without assistance from underlying processor technologies, concurrently on the same virtualization platform. By supporting both unmodified and paravirtualized Linux operating systems, VMware is extending its industry leadership in providing high performance virtualization for the broadest choice of x86-based operating systems.
VMware is also adding support for the Solaris x86 operating system across its virtual infrastructure products. Enterprises with mixed environments may now securely deploy and manage any combination of Linux, NetWare, Solaris x86 and Windows and instances across the same VMware virtualization platform, achieving higher system utilization and greater management efficiencies.
"VMware’s support for paravirtualized Linux and Solaris x86 operating systems and our experience with enabling virtual operating environments for more than 10,000 enterprise server customers is consistent with our continued commitment to give customers greater choice," said Jeffrey Engelmann, executive vice president of marketing at VMware. “With more options available, customers can transition a larger portion of their data center workloads to a virtual infrastructure and thereby benefit from the proven ROI of a virtual operating environment.”
VMware’s support for these additional operating systems means more customers can gain additional leverage from using VMware’s management software VirtualCenter with VMotion technology across heterogeneous operating system environments. This further extends the applicability of VMware virtual infrastructure as an enterprise-wide strategy.
"Using VMware virtual infrastructure on a large scale since 2002 has brought us multiple benefits," said Tony Adams, technology analyst for J.R. Simplot Company. "VMware's support of a wide variety of operating systems gives us the flexibility to run key applications on multiple operating systems in test, development, staging and production, and manage them with one set of tools. We plan to leverage their support of paravirtualized operating systems to continue to strengthen our infrastructure."
“While basic partitioning is a useful tool, it is important for our organization to be able to manage a variety of virtualized data center platforms with a consistent and comprehensive set of management tools,” said Craig Liess, network administrator for Central Transport International. “We have been using VMware virtual infrastructure in development, test and production environments and leveraging that familiarity and experience for additional operating systems would be ideal.”
"Virtual Infrastructure has increasingly become essential to our business," said Doug Baer, systems engineer for Desert Schools Federal Credit Union. "We have been using VMware Workstation, VMware GSX Server, VMware ESX Server and VMware VirtualCenter with VMotion technology in development, test and production environments for over a year. Support for even more guest operating systems provides us with the flexibility to deploy even more applications and enables us to get maximum value out of our computing resources."
Virtual infrastructure provides a layer of abstraction between the computing, storage and networking hardware and the software that runs on it. By creating a uniform virtual hardware platform, virtual infrastructure allows software to be installed on or moved from any industry-standard physical system to another without requiring reconfiguration of the software, operating system or applications. Virtual infrastructure makes existing resources more efficient and flexible, and drives down the cost of IT.
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.
# # #
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.