This reference architecture documents the blueprint for scaling from 300 desktops to tens of thousands of users with Atlantis ILIO to drive down the infrastructure cost per desktop to $172 for non-persistent desktops and $234 for persistent desktops while delivering a rich user experience that users can embrace. The impact is a dramatic reduction of up to 94 percent in the cost of storage for VDI and a major boost in performance of View desktops.

“Successful VDI deployments have one thing in common. They are able to achieve the right balance of cost, user experience and security that is needed to compete with a physical PC and win over the CFO, the security team and most importantly the end users,” said Bernard Harguindeguy, CEO of Atlantis Computing. “Too often reference architectures are designed without consideration for cost or for critical security components like Anti-Virus to achieve better performance numbers. This reference architecture is unique because it documents exactly how to assemble the components, the cost of the infrastructure, and the performance of every application without having to bring in new hardware components to the architecture.”

VMware View 5 with Atlantis ILIO storage and performance optimization software enables customers to deploy virtual desktops at a lower cost, while at the same time boosting performance to new levels. Atlantis ILIO fundamentally changes the economics and performance characteristics of VMware View deployments by intelligently optimizing how the Windows operating system running on vSphere interacts with shared or local storage. Atlantis ILIO technologies include highly efficient processing within the vSphere hypervisor of both Windows NTFS storage IO traffic and inline deduplication of Windows images before they reach storage.

In the reference architecture, Trend Micro Deep Security 8 provides agentless security for virtual desktops without negatively impacting density or performance. The Deep Security virtual appliance integrates with vShield Endpoint APIs developed by VMware in collaboration with Trend Micro to offer the industry’s first anti-malware solution designed specifically to protect the vSphere platform without requiring an agent in the virtual machine.

“Security is a critical component of any VDI deployment and yet it is often not included in reference architectures because of the impact on server density and performance,” said Thomas J. Miller, President, Trend Micro US Commercial Operations. “This reference architecture showed that you can deliver the lowest possible infrastructure costs, an amazing user experience and leading edge security in a complete VDI solution that costs less, performs better and is more secure than a physical PC.”

For more details about this announcement, visit http://newsroom.trendmicro.com/index.php?s=43&news_item=947&type=current&year=0

– — –

If you are interested in learning how VDI virtualization could benefit your business, contact SUREclient Solutions and speak with one of our representatives today! 1-888-371-7873.

VMware vShield Endpoint strengthens security for virtual machines and their hosts while significantly improving performance for virtual machine (VM) protection by offloading anti-malware processing to dedicated security-hardened virtual machines delivered by VMware partners.

Integrating VMware vShield Endpoint APIs has enabled Trend Micro to create anti-malware protection for VMs without requiring a third-party agent to be installed on each VM, thereby reducing memory and CPU load. As a result, Trend Micro is able to provide anti-malware protection for VMs, while minimizing performance and operational impact.

“VMware vShield Endpoint further demonstrates VMware’s ongoing commitment to security,” said Parag Patel, vice president, global strategic alliances, VMware. “Security solutions like Trend Micro Deep Security that leverage this new technology enable VMware vSphere™ customers to secure their virtualized desktops and servers while minimizing performance and operational impact. Customers can accelerate their virtualization investments, achieve higher VM consolidation rates and reap greater operational expenditure savings, while helping to ensure compliance with regulations and corporate policies.”

Trend Micro delivers agentless anti-malware for VMware through Trend Micro™ Deep Security 7.5, which was also announced today (please see press release here). Deep Security provides advanced protection for virtualized systems, and the latest version includes agentless anti-malware, together with IDS/IPS, web application protection, firewall, integrity monitoring and log inspection modules.

For more details about this announcement, visit http://newsroom.trendmicro.com/index.php?s=43&news_item=829&type=archived&year=2010

– — –

If you are interested in learning how secure virtualization could benefit your business, contact SUREclient Solutions and speak with one of our representatives today! 1-888-371-7873.

“With the release of VMware vSphere 5, VMware is helping customers accelerate their journey toward a more efficient and automated cloud infrastructure,” said Bogomil Balkansky, senior vice president, cloud infrastructure products, VMware. “The enhancements and new innovations we’ve introduced in VMware vSphere 5 provide a robust, reliable platform for business applications, enabling customers to effectively respond to the growing needs of their business and giving them confidence in their IT transformation.”

The foundation of VMware’s cloud infrastructure suite, VMware vSphere 5, includes new features and enhancements to deliver better application performance and availability for all business-critical applications. It also introduces advanced automation capabilities to free IT from manual processes and allow it to be more responsive to changing business requirements.

VMware vSphere 5 also introduces three key new flagship features – Auto-Deploy, Profile-Driven Storage and Storage DRS – that extend the platform’s unique datacenter resource management capabilities, delivering intelligent policy management to support an automated “set it and forget it” approach to managing datacenter resources, including server deployment and storage management. Customers can define policies and establish the operating parameters, and VMware vSphere 5 does the rest.

For more details about this announcement, visit http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/vmw-vsphere-ga-082511.html

– — –

If you are interested in learning how VMware virtualization could benefit your business, contact SUREclient Solutions and speak with one of our representatives today! 1-888-371-7873.

Advancing Enterprise-Class Collaboration in the Cloud

Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance is a next generation email and collaboration solution that is designed to run on VMware vSphere, VMware’s award-winning virtualization platform. Customers have the flexibility to run Zimbra Appliance either within their own datacenter, or via one of VMware’s more than 2,000 VMware vCloud™ partners who host the application as a service. Because it is delivered as a virtual appliance, customers can deploy the application faster than traditional software deployments – within minutes instead of hours. As a result of this simplified virtual appliance model, customers and partners can manage their email and collaboration needs with fewer resources, less costs and lower risk. The Zimbra Appliance provides a personal and team cloud for the end user, administrator and datacenter.

The Zimbra Appliance leverages the best-of-breed virtualization capabilities of the VMware vSphere platform to enable dynamic provisioning and scalability, high availability, backup, and disaster recovery. As a result, customers can improve service levels by reducing the impact of planned and unplanned hardware downtime. The Zimbra Appliance also features integrated security technologies including a firewall, anti-virus and anti-spam solutions.

“We’re excited about the opportunity to provide VMware customers worldwide with Zimbra’s best-in-class email and collaboration solution paired with VMware vSphere’s leading virtualization platform,” said Jim Morrisroe, Zimbra General Manager.  “The Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance delivers customers secure email with the assurance that their data is protected on our VMware vSphere virtualization platform, and a collaboration solution that they can fully deploy in a matter of minutes – literally going from install to inbox in less than ten minutes.”

“Zimbra Collaboration Suite combined with VMware vSphere enables us to offer our customers the best of both worlds – a leading email and collaboration solution, running on the industry’s most complete and widely deployed virtualization platform,” said Craig McLellan, CTO at Hosting.com.  “With the addition of the Zimbra Appliance, we are able to provide additional email and collaboration options for our 30,000+ clients who count on us for their critical infrastructure services.”

For more details about this announcement, visit http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/zimbra-appliances.html

– — –

If you are interested in learning how Zimbra email and collaboration or VMware virtualization could benefit your business, contact SUREclient Solutions and speak with one of our representatives today! 1-888-371-7873.

Zimbra is a powerful commercial open source email server application. One of the leading benefits of the Zimbra platform is it’s cross-platform compatibility with Windows, Linux and Mac clients. Notably, it also offers tight integration with Microsoft Outlook, which is used extensively by businesses small and large. In addition to the core email functions, Zimbra also boasts extensive shared calendaring, address books, wiki document manager, even instant messaging capabilities.

At SUREclient we have been using Zimbra internally and implementing it as an effective solution for our clients for several years. As partners with both Zimbra and VMware, this announcement comes as great news to us. While Yahoo! has made great strides increasing the market adoption of Zimbra, having the product in the hands of innovators like VMware makes the future of Zimbra brighter than ever. Assuming that VMware puts the same quality and level of research and development into Zimbra as they have put into their line of virtualization products, I can see only good coming of this business arrangement.

In addition to what this acquisition will do to enhance Zimbra, this also opens up some interesting observations concerning where the overall VMware strategy is headed as well. By investing in an email server application such as Zimbra, VMware has extended their reach from primarily a virtualization and infrastructure management provider into application platforms as well.

For more information on exactly what this means to VMware, and for an explanation of their reasoning for making this strategic move, read Steve Herrod’s (CTO at VMware) blog post – http://bit.ly/6e68rA.

– — –

If you are interested in learning how VMware virtualization or Zimbra email and collaboration could benefit your business, contact SUREclient Solutions and speak with one of our representatives today! 1-888-371-7873.

The coalition aims to ease adoption of virtual environments and accelerate build-outs of private cloud infrastructures with the announcement of Vblock Infrastructure Packages.

Vblock Infrastructure Packages are validated platforms of engineered, integrated IT infrastructure from Cisco, EMC and VMware, that deliver a breakthrough total cost of ownership and pervasive virtualization at a scale to meet today’s most demanding use cases.

For more details on this announcement, visit http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/virtual-computing-environment.html

VMware Workstation 7 features advanced capabilities to help developers, QA engineers, technical sales professionals, and IT administrators get up and running faster and streamline tasks that save time and improve productivity.

The first desktop virtualization product with Windows Aero support, VMware Workstation 7 also boasts 3D application support and IDE integrations with SpringSource Tools Suite and Eclipse IDE along with support for over 200 guest operating systems.

For more information about this release, visit: http://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/

Windows 7

Windows 7 marks the latest edition of the Microsoft Windows desktop workstation operating system. While its predecessor, Windows Vista, introduced quite a few new features, the Windows 7 release is a more focused, incremental upgrade to the Windows product line, geared toward being more “user-centric”, according to Microsoft. Improvements include a redesigned Windows Shell, a home networking system called HomeGroup, and other general performance improvements.

Windows 7 will be available in six different editions, but only Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate will be widely available from retail outlets. The other editions are focused on other markets, such as the developing world or enterprise use.

The Windows 7 Family Pack Upgrade edition is also available, which will license the update of three machines from any 2000 (any edition), XP (any edition), or Vista (Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium editions) to the Windows 7 Home Premium edition.

See more details at Microsoft’s website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

Windows Server 2008 R2

Often referred to as “Windows 7 Server”, Windows Server 2008 R2 is also now available. This update to the server line of operating systems introduces several significant enhancements. New features include new virtualization features within Hyper-V, new Active Directory features, IIS 7.5, and support for 256 processors. Most notably, support for 32-bit x86 architecture processors has been removed in this release.

For more details on the new and updated features in the Windows Server 2008 R2 release, visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/r2-compare-features.aspx

VMware Delivers New Management Solution for Unprecedented Insight Into Datacenter Capacity – Optimizing for Reduced Waste, Overhead and Risk

PALO ALTO, Calif., October 19, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced the availability of VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, a new product in the VMware vCenter Product Family that provides complete capacity management for VMware virtualized environments. VMware CapacityIQ empowers IT administrators with the necessary intelligence to be able to right-size capacity in a dynamic virtual environment. It provides unprecedented visibility into past, present and future infrastructure capacity in order to analyze what is available and what is being used; forecast what is needed; and plan when capacity will run out. As a result, VMware CapacityIQ helps eliminate infrastructure waste, reduce operational overhead and minimize business risk of outages, failures and disasters.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables customers to proactively monitor capacity at multiple levels, analyze the impact of changes and forecast future needs based on consumption patterns. VMware CapacityIQ is critical for VMware customers who are interested in growing their virtual infrastructure cost-effectively –supporting server applications or virtual desktops – enabling them to:

• Reduce cost by reclaiming unused capacity. CapacityIQ proactively analyzes resource usage patterns and automatically generates a list of virtual machines that have been over-provisioned. Armed with this information, virtual infrastructure administrators can reclaim unused resources instead of purchasing additional capacity.
• Mitigate risk by modeling the effect of capacity changes. CapacityIQ helps customers avoid potential business and service disruptions by proactively modeling the impact of a planned change such as an acquisition or new application or an unplanned outage, failure or disaster.
• Deliver the right capacity at the right time. CapacityIQ keeps track of a dynamic VMware virtual environment by helping customers monitor capacity and forecast future capacity needs, helping to ensure capacity is always available to meet required service levels.

“In virtualized environments, customers can optimize performance and boost their ROIs by properly allocating resources,” said Bogomil Balkansky, VP, product marketing, server business unit, for VMware. “VMware vCenter CapacityIQ is the first product that enables customers to fully analyze their virtualized environments, identify bottlenecks and wasted resources, and plan for current and future capacity needs so they have confidence that they can meet business demands.”

“With VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, VMware is delivering a key solution for one of the most impactful areas of virtual systems management,” said Andi Mann, VP of research for independent IT analyst firm, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “Good capacity planning tools are essential for any virtualization deployment. EMA research clearly shows that this discipline contributes to higher VM densities, higher admin efficiency, better application performance, and more best practice outcomes.”

“In a virtual infrastructure where all resources are shared, optimal performance can only be achieved with the right amount of properly allocated resources,” said Mike Laskowski, solutions architect, R.R. Donnelly.  “With vCenter Capacity IQ, we can easily identify over- and under-provisioned virtual machines, helping us to reduce both waste and performance risk. CapacityIQ’s ‘what if analysis’ and reporting features help us with ongoing planning and deployment to ensure the right level of resources and the best possible ROI.”

Availability and Pricing
For more information or to purchase VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, please visit: http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-capacityiq/.

About VMware
VMware delivers solutions for business infrastructure virtualization that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes.  With the industry leading virtualization platform – VMware vSphere™ – customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion, more than 150,000 customers and 22,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. VMware is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware and VMware vCenter are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.
# # #

New VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4 Provides Better Protection of Environments with Optimized Control, Expanded Storage Support and Ability to Failover Multiple Sites to One

PALO ALTO, Calif., October 5, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced the availability of VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4, enabling automated, reliable and affordable disaster recovery. Part of the VMware vCenter Product Family, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides automated disaster recovery for virtual environments. Now, with added support for Network File System (NFS) based storage replication, compatibility with VMware vSphere™ 4, and simplified “many-to-one” failover using shared recovery sites, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager makes it even easier for customers to confidently protect all of their virtual environments.

Disaster recovery is critical for companies to protect corporate data, but has typically been difficult to achieve due to costs and complexity. Disasters in the datacenter – whether they are caused by hurricanes, earthquakes, power outages, or other unexpected events – can result in downtime for business critical applications. Extended downtime significantly impacts revenues, service level agreements (SLAs) and business operations. Traditional solutions for disaster recovery require complex, manual recovery processes, and can be very difficult to set up, test and keep up-to-date. Regulatory requirements can also present challenges to disaster recovery solutions. As a result, organizations only provide disaster recovery plans for the most critical applications.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager addresses these challenges by centralizing management of recovery plans and automating the testing and recovery process, resulting in rapid, reliable, affordable disaster recovery. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, originally released in 2008, has become the defacto standard for automating disaster recovery, with more than 2,000 customers and support from 12 leading storage vendors www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/srm4-partner.html.

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4 now provides:

• VMware vSphere 4 Support. Customers can now take advantage of the capabilities of VMware vSphere 4, including Fault Tolerance, for better performance and protection of applications.
• Expanded Storage Support. Lets users leverage iSCSI, Fiber Channel, and NFS storage and replication solutions
• Many-to-One Failover. Protects multiple production sites with automated failover into a single, shared recovery site

“VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4 dramatically simplifies the disaster recovery process for customers so they can meet demanding business needs for disaster recovery, including regulatory compliance issues,” said Raghu Raghuram, vice president and general manager, server business unit, for VMware. “Now with many-to-one failover and expanded storage support, more customers can take advantage of low-cost disaster recovery and gain peace of mind that their data is safe in the event of a disaster.”
"Disaster recovery is one of the most daunting and complicated challenges for IT organizations, and it isn’t getting any easier as applications proliferate and expectations with regard to recovery times shorten," said Richard Villars, vice president of storage and executive strategies at IDC. "Virtualization of server and storage environments are playing a key role in helping companies reduce the costs and complexities associated with implementing, testing, and executing a full disaster recovery, yet their effectiveness increasingly depends upon solutions that automate the fast expanding disaster recovery process itself."

“In my 25 years of IT experience, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager is one of the best solutions that I have ever implemented,” said Ed Belliveau, principal systems engineer, Bentley University. “With the latest Site Recovery Manager improvements and features, coupled with integration with VMware vSphere™, disaster recovery preparation is much easier.”

Leading storage vendors have shown strong support for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager with integrations for their storage and replication systems. Visit www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/srm4-partner.html to view partner support for VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4. For more information or to purchase VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager, visit: http://www.vmware.com/products/srm