VMware Partner News

VMLive is VMware's interactive webinar series designed specifically for our partner community. There are two versions of VMLive - Tech Edition and Sales Edition. Tech Edition is intended for the System Engineer and Technical Consultant audience; the Sales Edition is intended for sales, marketing and business audience. VMLive is available exclusively to VMware partners.

Join us on Tuesday, December 11, 2007 for the third webinar in our monthly VMLive webinar series focusing on product availability and resource enhancements for VMware Professional Partners. During this informative webinar, you will learn how you can skillfully use your knowledge of virtualization to overcome customer objections and close business in Q4, as well as get our monthly update on what's new in the Partner Learning Center and on Partner Central.

• Topic: Successfully Selling Virtualization to SMBs, Part III -- Enabling Partners for Success: Closing Business in Q4
• Date: Tuesday, December 11, 2007
• Time: 8:30 am PST / 11:30 am EST

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An updated ROI/TCO Calculator which now analyzes potential savings from VMware Lab Manager and Virtual Desktop Infrastructre in addition to Virtual Infrastructure is now available. This is simply the best way to showcase the incredible ROI of our solutions, which research has shown, is the primary driver for initial adoption. Now the calculator will help you cross-sell additional solutions as we close out Q4. This new version also lets you export analyses to Excel, customize your virtualization schedule, and calculate carbon emission reductions. The calculator reflects the experience of thousands of VMware customers and industry data to quantify TCO savings, investments, and business benefits of implementing our solutions.

• Topic: The New Integrated VMware ROI/TCO Calculator (Version 2)
• Date: Thursday, December 13, 2007
• Time: 8:30 am PST / 11:30 am EST

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VMware Infrastructure 3 offers SMBs a scalable and cost-effective way to optimize utilization of technology assets, simplify IT management, and protect the data and IT environments that run their businesses. 

Three new Acceleration Kits are now available, one for each of the three editions of VI3.  These new kits offer midsize and smaller organizations and branch offices a cost-effective way to deploy a comprehensive virtualization solution that includes centralized management functionality. The ideal customer has a growing IT environment with between 15 – 60 servers. 

Customers can choose the Acceleration Kit that best meets their requirements today, knowing that as their IT demands evolve and increase, VMware Infrastructure provides a simple upgrade path to more robust virtualization solutions.  These kits also present an ideal solution for customers who have tried VMware Server and are ready to step up to a more comprehensive and scalable virtualization solution that VI enables.

Log in to Partner Central >> Products & Solutions >> SMB to find more information on kit specific messaging, banners, and FAQs.

How do you know if your customer order qualifies for VPP benefits? VMware’s VPP Configurator is available on Partner Central and helps you:

• Query for a customer’s VPP membership number
• Process a mock order to calculate the order’s VPP points
• Determines if and what VPP band the order qualifies for

The VPP Configurator is a powerful tool that assists new and existing partners with product combinations, validating SnS, validating list prices for products, and confirms required product combinations for VPP qualification.

Try out the VPP Product Calculator today by logging into Partner Central >> Products & Solutions >> VPP Configurator.

VMLive is VMware's interactive webinar series designed specifically for our partner community. There are two versions of VMLive - Tech Edition and Sales Edition. Tech Edition is intended for the System Engineer and Technical Consultant audience; the Sales Edition is intended for sales, marketing and business audience. VMLive is available exclusively to VMware partners.

VMware ESX Server 3i is the industry's first thin hypervisor integrated into server hardware. Go in-depth to learn about the technical features and find out why the hardware-embedded architecture of ESX Server 3i raises the bar for security and reliability and lays the foundation for a dynamic, automated data center.

• Topic: VMLive ESX Server 3i Technical Deep Dive
• Date: Thursday, November 29, 2007
• Time: 8:30 am PST/11:30 am EST, 4:30 pm London

Register Now >>

Get the competitive edge with VMware's Capacity Planner, our award-winning IT business and decision support tool. Capacity Planner is an agentless hosted model tool which allows our partners to perform consolidation estimates or assessments, and delivers fast and accurate information for better informed IT business decisions.

VMware Professional Partners can now receive the training and purchase licenses allowing them to deliver consolidation estimates and assessments. Sign up for a training class today and learn how you can empower your customers' IT decisions and maximize your sales and consulting potential

Sign up today

Oracle announced this week that it is entering the virtualization market with a Xen-based hypervisor. This announcement is likely to generate questions from your customers, especially those that use Oracle products. This response addresses those questions and clarifies that, in spite of confusing statements in their announcement, Oracle continues to support their products in VMware virtual machines. We also address claims of greater efficiency for Oracle VM with news from VMware’s performance team showing our leadership in virtualized Oracle Database performance.

We also want to stress that Oracle and VMware remain partners with a substantial joint installed base of customers running Oracle products on VMware platforms and ongoing technology initiatives that are strengthening product ties between the two companies. VMware and Oracle both remain committed to building superior virtualization solutions for customers that run Oracle databases and applications on VMware Infrastructure. VMware and Oracle will continue to jointly support our partners that sell and support those solutions.

What Was Announced?

Oracle announced Oracle VM at their Oracle OpenWorld user conference. Oracle VM is a Xen hypervisor based on Oracle Enterprise Linux. Oracle also announced that the Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server middleware and selected applications would be certified when run in Oracle Enterprise Linux virtual machines on Oracle VM. Oracle claimed that Oracle VM is more efficient than other virtualization products. Oracle VM is free, but annual support costs are $499 for two-socket systems and $999 for unlimited sockets.

Oracle Press Release:

• "Oracle Unveils Oracle VM"

Press/Blog Coverage:

• “ Oracle Introduces Oracle VM As It Leaps Into Virtualization” - Information Week
• "Analysts call Oracle's virtualization bluff" - ZDnet

VMware Summary Response:

• Oracle VM is yet another Xen variant offering far less than VMware Infrastructure. Once customers investigate the Oracle offering, they will conclude that VI3 is the overwhelming choice for their virtualization strategy. VI3 provides the full complement of availability, resource management functionality and the maturity of a production proven platform with extensive certifications and support (2,000 hardware models certified, 30+ guest operating systems). Tens of thousands of customers have standardized on a "VMware first" policy. Informed customers will no more choose a Xen product over VI3 than they would choose MySQL over Oracle.
• Oracle's open source offerings have very limited adoption.
  • Ask your customers: How much of the market has adopted Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) one year after its launch against the leading Red Hat Linux distribution? Answer: An insignificant minority.
  • We believe Oracle VM faces a similar hurdle, as the overwhelming majority of customers want uniform and powerful functionality for automation and management across all of their applications, not fragmented application- or vendor-specific virtualization silos. Oracle VM will now be the 5th or 6th Xen variant to be introduced (Citrix, Virtual Iron, Red Hat, Sun, Novell/SUSE, etc.) with each limited by incompatible virtual machines, differing functionality and divergent levels of certification and support.
• All the disadvantages of Xen. Oracle VM suffers from all the disadvantages of the Xen hypervisor’s OS-centric architecture, such as vulnerabilities from using a general-purpose management operating system, poor scalability and incomplete/missing enterprise functionality.
• Oracle continues to support customers using VMware; "certification" of Oracle VM is of limited practical value.
  • Per Oracle MetaLink Note 249212.1, Oracle supports most of its products in a VMware environment by referring non-Oracle specific issues to VMware on an as needed basis. In addition, most enterprises have been able to negotiate unlimited full support with their Oracle representatives.
  • Hundreds of customers run Oracle products (applications, databases and middleware) on VMware Infrastructure in dev/test and production - more than any other virtualization platform. Over 40 referenceable customers are running Oracle products on VMware Infrastructure today.
  • Please contact VMware if your customers run into Oracle support issues, as we have been able to unblock most enterprise customers who encounter difficulties.
  • Oracle's "certification" of Oracle VM covers a minority of customer environments. Certification applies only to Oracle Enterprise Linux, which currently accounts for less than 5% of Oracle’s Linux user base. Oracle explicitly acknowledges very poor performance of Oracle VM with Windows environments, which represent a large majority of customer’s Oracle platforms.
• Set the facts straight around VMware and Oracle performance. Oracle claims around, "Three times greater efficiency," are misleading marketing stunts. VMware extensively tuned ESX Server to run both databases and other mission critical applications well. Real-world Oracle database performance can run near-native on paravirtualized Linux guests with VMware Infrastructure 3.5, and runs very favorably without relying on non-standard guest patches. Please refer to “Ten Reasons Why Oracle Databases Run Best on VMware”and "Virtualize Your Oracle Landscape" for updated benchmarks that demonstrates the practical, real-world benefits of running Oracle on VI3.
• VMware will continue to work with Oracle because the majority of customers want the flexibility and choice offered by Oracle products on VMware Infrastructure.
  • Given Oracle's acknowledgement of x86 virtualization as a fact of life, we believe increasing and consistent customer demand will lead to fully unfettered support and virtualization-aware licensing policies. Please let the your VMware team know about customers who are interested in advocating Oracle to fully support VMware Infrastructure as an “equal” platform to Oracle VM.

For more information please read our detailed response document.

VMware Infrastructure 3 will be available for sale on November 30, 2007 with new pricing and packaging options. Our new features will allow VMware customers to further streamline the management of IT environments through greater levels of automation, increase overall infrastructure availability and boost performance for mission critical workloads.

Specifically, VMware Infrastructure 3 Foundation will be available at a license list price of $995 USD and will include ESX Server or ESX Server 3i, VMFS, Virtual SMP, VC Agent, Update Manager and Consolidated Backup. VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard will be available at a license list price of $2,995 and will include all options available with VMware Infrastructure 3 foundation plus High Availability. VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise will be available at a license list price of $5,750 and include all the functionality of VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard plus DRS, DPM, VMotion and Storage VMotion.

The new features in VMware Infrastructure 3 meet the needs of a broad range of customers and IT environments - from midsize and small businesses to branch offices and corporate datacenters within global 100 corporations - and extend the value of all three layers of the virtualization suite.

Effective November 8, 2007, the pricing for VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard will be reduced to $2,995 USD. This is to align with pricing recently announced for VMware Infrastructure 3. In line with our current policy, customers who purchase VMware Infrastructure 3 Standard along with SnS will be entitled to upgrade to VMware Infrastructure 3 at no charge. As previously communicated, VMware Infrastructure 3 will be available on November 30, 2007.

For more information, review the VMware Infrastructure 3 Pricing and Packaging information in Partner Central >> Product Information >> Pricing.

Expand the number of virtual infrastructure conversations with your current customers and prospects. New VMware products and features provide new solution areas for customers.  Can you easily map out and clearly articulate the roadmap of virtualization that can help solve many different customer business problems today? Learn how to sell the full virtual infrastructure message and get to that bigger sale quicker.

Register now for the VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI) SolutionTrack. These one-day events will fully enable you to position, whiteboard and sell VMware's Virtual Infrastructure to prospects and existing customers. The new VI whiteboard can be used with C-level audiences and senior technical managers. You'll also be trained in multiple presentation scenarios using interactive role plays.

We will also provide an overview of new products, including the new features of VMware Infrastructure 3 - e.g., Site Recovery Manager, ESX Server 3.5/VC 2.5 with Storage VMotion and Update Manager.

By attending this Virtual Infrastructure SolutionTrack, you will learn:

• How to position Virtual Infrastructure to prospects
• How to sell the value of Virtual Infrastructure
• How to accelerate the business value customers can receive from a Virtual Infrastructure
• Sales Training Session
• Technical Training Session

Please note that space will be limited and registration will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. For further information, please contact your VMware Partner Business Manager.

Register Now!

VMLive is VMware's interactive webinar series designed specifically for our partner community. There are two versions of VMLive - Tech Edition and Sales Edition. Tech Edition is intended for the System Engineer and Technical Consultant audience; the Sales Edition is intended for sales, marketing and business audience. VMLive is available exclusively to VMware partners.

• Topic: Business Critical Support
• Date: Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
• Time: 8:30 am PST/11:30 am EST, 4:30 pm London

Register Now >>