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Monthly Archives: February 2012

Small Businesses Can Reap Big Benefits from Collaboration, Productivity Tools

There’s no question that today’s businesses are searching for ways to do more with less – all in the name of increasing productivity – and data-driven applications that encourage collaboration are often at the top of the list.

For example, economists from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania recently studied 179 large companies – and found that those who adopted “data-driven decision-making” achieved productivity gains that were “5 to 6 percent higher than could be explained by other factors,” including technology investments.

The researchers found that business productivity wasn’t just about simply collecting data – it was about collaboration and how it was used efficiently to drive such major decisions as whether to create a new product or launch a new service. At the end of the day, the difference, said researchers, was about making better decisions based not on traditional management tactics as experience and intuition – but on data and analysis.

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Protect Your Business by Upgrading to vSphere Enterprise Acceleration Kit Today

One of the top concerns that we consistently see plaguing SMB IT decision-makers centers on finding ways to better protect business processes and assets. According to Gartner, 40% of companies that suffer a business interruption fail within 5 years.

If you’re currently using VMware’s vSphere Essentials Plus Kit, one way to better protect your business is to upgrade to VMware’s vSphere Enterprise Acceleration Kit, which includes vCenter Server Standard and 6 CPUs of vSphere Enterprise. From now until June 15th, 2012, we’re running a promotion that takes 30% off the regular upgrade price, saving you more than $4,500. With vSphere Enterprise Acceleration Kit, you can ensure that your business production apps always get the computing power they need, even at the highest consolidation ratios (get more from your existing hardware using DRS!). VSphere Accelleration Kit

Protect your business with Enterprise Acceleration Kit, which keeps your business running through server failures with uninterrupted application availability (see our Fault Tolerance feature) and put an end to planned downtime for server or storage maintenance (read more on vMotion and Storage vMotion).

To upgrade today, click here.

Suggestions, questions, or more concerns that we can help out with?  Make sure to leave us a note. 

-Julia Lee, Product Marketing Manager, VMware

 

VMUG – Your Opportunity to Connect and Learn with Your Fellow VMware Users

So what exactly is VMUG? VMUG (the VMware User Group) is an independent, customer-led organization working to maximize our members’ use of VMware and partner solutions.

VMUG is made up of people like you – in fact more than 75,000 people like you belong to VMUG. Our members come from around the world, from a variety of industries and companies (small to medium to big to self-employed), with a variety of experiences.

So how does VMUG bring all these different people from all these around the world together? We’re able to bring our members together in a number of ways, including:

  •  Local VMUG groups: We have 180+ local VMUG groups around the world, each hosting multiple face-to-face meetings throughout the year. In fact, we’re probably coming to your neighborhood soon – you can take a look here.
  • Educational webcasts: We are broadcasting live, informative webcasts throughout the year that you can participate in right from your desk
  • User Conferences: We are holding 30 full-day, multi-track conferences around the world. Check here to see if we’re coming to your city this year
  • VMUG Voice: Our monthly e-newsletter delivering the latest news and announcements from VMware, the industry, and the VMUG organization directly to your inbox
  • VMUG Advantage: An exclusive, members-only opportunity to save on training, certification, VMworld registration, and more here

The best part? VMUG membership is free! All you have to do is register here and you can start taking advantage of all VMUG has to offer.

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We look forward to working with you!

Frannie Garvey, Communities Manager, VMUG"

 

Desktops are alive and well in a VDI World

Many users assume that virtual desktop adoption is directly tied to the demise of the PC.  But many VDI customers, and particularly smaller customers in education and government, are convinced that PCs are here to stay and will be the predominant endpoint device.  Here are some of the intriguing findings that I’ve gathered during my last few months spent talking with small to mid-market users about their plans.

Everyone acknowledges that the cost and cool factor of tablets acting as primary client computing devices is what gets the headlines.  The reality of non-PC device ubiquity firmly took root for me when smartphone shipments passed PC shipments back in 20101.

From this tablet and smartphone-centric view, one would conclude that Microsoft apps are simply a legacy burden to be endured only until all-web-all-the-time-apps take over.  Less expensive thin clients, zero clients, and mobile client devices would logically replace PCs as user clients and importantly, the Microsoft tax on traditional PC use ends.  

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VMware Fusion 4 + OSX Lion = Savings

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VMware Fusion4 + OSX Lion=Get 10% OFF VMware Fusion February 14th through February 16th, 2012 until 11:59 PM (PST). Hurry! Limited Time Offer, Act Now! (Available- Worldwide)

Get details here

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VMware Workstation 8 “Can’t-Miss Deal”

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Do more than you ever thought possible with your PC.   Use VMware Workstation to save time by running multiple version of Windows, Linux or a full web or cloud environment right on your PC.  Or run VMware Workstation as a server to share virtual machines with your teammates, department, or organization. Then when you are ready to move to the internal cloud, quickly drag and drop to upload your virtual machines to vSphere.  Try it today and experience why Workstation is recognized for its ease of use, comprehensive feature set, and high performance.              

Celebrate Valentine’s Day with our ‘Can’t-Miss Deal’, Save 20% OFF VMware Workstation February 14th through February 16th, 2012 until 11:59 PM (PST). Hurry! Limited Time Offer, Act Now! (Available- Worldwide)

Get the details here….

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Introducing vCenter Protect (Shavlik Technologies acquisition)

VMware and Shavlik Technologies have been partners for years and decided to officially tie the knot in 2011. vCenter Protect (formerly Shavlik NetChk Protect) complements vSphere perfectly and helps medium and smaller organizations to manage the transition from physical to virtual.  With vCenter Protect, we are transforming IT solutions to enable IT generalists to take advantage of the efficiencies gained with the latest technologies, while using a simplified, easy-to-use IT Management solution at an affordable price. 

VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus, purpose-built for SMB and departmental needs, provides centralized patch management, asset inventory, antivirus, power management, and configuration management for both virtual and legacy physical systems in an integrated solution. This includes centralized management for Windows operating systems and the most widely used Windows-hosted applications running on both virtual and physical servers and workstations. 

The bottom line is that businesses today need to simplify and transform their IT infrastructure while at the same time, deliver greater IT-enabled services to their employees and ultimately their customers. vCenter Protect combined with vSphere is just the solution to support this business transformation.

If you are looking for the right solution to simplify your IT management needs, VMware’s Product Advisor can help you answer three short questions to determine the solution that’s perfect for your business. Click Here to launch the vCenter Protect Product Advisor.  

Understand and Master Virtualization with VMware’s New Free Training Promotion

Beginning February 1 through June 15th, 2012 you can receive free training to build your understanding and mastery of vSphere when you purchase a VMware vSphere® Acceleration Kit with Management. This promotion gives you 35 Training Credits ($3500 value) to use towards a variety of instructor-led and online self-paced training courses that help you understand and master the functionality in vSphere 5 and our other management products.

If you’re trying to master vSphere for the first time, use these credits to take our flagship introductory course VMware vSphere 5: Install, Configure, Manage. If you’re already familiar with the vSphere platform, select from a variety of courses on vCloud Director, vShield App and Edge, Site Recovery Manager, among our other products.

Our vSphere Acceleration Kits with Management just launched this past November and aim to help you build out a scalable virtualized infrastructure that maximizes IT efficiency, security, multi-site availability, and application service levels. Three different kits are available to cater to your IT and business needs:

  • VMware vSphere Standard Acceleration Kit with Smart Operations Management, which offers performance management to maximize your IT infrastructure efficiency.
  • VMware vSphere Enterprise Acceleration Kit with Business Production Management, which provides multi-site availability and protection of your business critical applications from network-based threats.
  • VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus Acceleration Kit with Cloud Infrastructure Management, which transforms your datacenter into on-demand private clouds that accelerate your delivery and consumption of IT services.

For more information on these kits, click here.

AKM Free Training

 

Guest post from David Jasso on Achieving PCI 2.0 Compliance With VMware

I just read an interesting article on achieving PCI compliance for SMBs (PCI DSS compliance — what does it look like for a small business?)  From my standpoint I see a couple of key takeaways.  The first is that any company that stores, processes or transmits credit card data has some level of compliance responsibility although requirements vary greatly depending on the annual number of transactions.  The second takeaway is that achieving compliance generally requires changes to operations along with some level of incremental investment in both technology and labor.

SMBs have been at the forefront of adopting virtualization.  Often these organizations don’t face the complicated legacy issues that very large companies face.  This combined with the benefit of radically lower technology acquisition costs and the ability to move very quickly has made leveraging virtualization a no brainer for SMBs. A core challenge not addressed in this article but one that is very relevant for SMBs is how to reconcile the need to satisfy PCI related requirements while still being able to fully leverage the benefits of virtualization such as the ability to run mixed mode operations.

The landscape around PCI and virtualization has been pretty muddy.  The new PCI 2.0 standard along with the subsequent virtualization supplement has helped but much is still left to the imagination of both implementers and auditors.  VMware has been working with QSAs such as Coalfire to clarify how to successfully address PCI while still being able to fully leverage virtualization.  This link takes you to a whitepaper written by Coalfire that highlights some of the core technologies that VMware offers that can help you address PCI compliance.  VMware is actively working to deliver more guidance in this area but this will give you a good overview on how VMware can help companies of any size achieve PCI 2.0 compliance.

We (VMware) would love to hear back from you around what you are doing to address PCI requirements in a virtualized environment.  Also check back from time to time to get an update on the work we are doing around ensuring that you can run secure and compliant virtualized environment for PCI as well as other compliance sensitive workloads.

David Jasso
Group Product Marketing Manager, vCenter Configuration Manager

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