The VMworld buzz starts in earnest. Today we announced that – no surprise to anyone that has been paying attention – vSphere is a hit. 21,000 new customers chose VMware in the first half of this year, and vSphere 4 has been downloaded 350,000 times since it was launched 13 weeks ago. We also ran a poll on our website, and 75% of the folks who responded said they'd be upgrading over the next 6 months. (That's not a scientific survey, but it's in general agreement with Eric Siebert's vSphere-Land poll, where 67% of the respondents said they'd be upgrading their production environments to vSphere within 6 months.)
I think our press releases are actually really well-written — they usually have quite useful information in them and a minimum "global, leading, market-leading" marketing speak. For this release, I particularly like the customer quotes, including the virtualization blogosphere's own Lone Sysadmin, Bob Plankers. (Bob will be at VMworld this year and a judge in the SearchServerVirtualization's Best of VMworld 2009 award. If you run into him, say hi and tell him you read his press release quote.)
“As a result of upgrading to VMware vSphere 4, the museum has saved
$200,000 AUD on hardware procurement costs since migrating from VMware
Infrastructure 3. We’ve also reduced our power requirements by 33
percent and have achieved a server consolidation ratio of 12:1,” said
Dan Collins, manager of information technology at Powerhouse Museum.
“VMware vSphere 4 has also dramatically improved our infrastructure
responsiveness and flexibility, and most importantly enhanced our
recoverability of systems and information.”…“After seeing the benefits of virtualizing our infrastructure
applications, we wanted to move our SQL database into the virtualized
environment,” said Roy K. Turner, server systems engineer, Frederick
Memorial Hospital. “The improved performance and enhanced reliability
in VMware vSphere 4 have been invaluable in exceeding our SLAs and
preventing revenue loss from our mission-critical applications. VMware
Fault Tolerance further improves uptime for our most critical
applications by providing zero-downtime recovery from hardware
failures, while VMware Data Recovery helps us easily back up and
protect our critical data.”"With VMware, we've found that we can roll out new services much
faster, as well as increase the reliability of existing services, while
cutting the costs of doing both,” said Bob Plankers, technical
architect, University of Wisconsin – Madison. “With VMware vSphere 4,
our infrastructure management becomes much simpler through the use of
new VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch and Host Profiles. VMware
vSphere 4 also increased the amount of I/O, memory, and CPU available,
meaning we can virtualize nearly every workload we have."
You can see from the quotes we've come a long way from server consolidation – for VMware customers, it's about increasing your business agility. Or to dip into the language of the release: vSphere "offers unmatched cost savings; delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications; provides uncompromised control over application service levels, and preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting." That's some marketing speak I can believe in.
More VMworld news to come!
John Troyer
