Overview

Bring the Power of Cloud Computing to Your Datacenter

Transform your IT infrastructure into a private cloud—a collection of internal clouds federated on-demand to external clouds—delivering IT infrastructure as an easily accessible service. VMware vSphere delivers uncompromised control over all IT resources with the highest efficiency and choice in the industry. Find out why VMware is the leader in virtualization technology.

Reduce Costs and Maximize IT Efficiency

Dramatically reduce capital and operational expenses, while minimizing any potential lost revenue associated with downtime, outages and failures. VMware vSphere is proven to comprehensively virtualize server, storage, and networking resources, reducing capital and operational expenses per application by more than 50 percent.

Organizations can achieve consolidation ratios of more than 15:1, while increasing efficiency through management automation and the dynamic allocation of resources to business-critical applications across internal and external cloud infrastructures.

Increase IT Control Through Service-Level Automation

Automate the enforcement of service-level agreements to ensure the availability, security and scalability of business-critical applications. VMware vSphere shields application owners from the complexity of servers, storage and network infrastructure—enabling them to focus on delivering business value. The result is an automated, controlled and resilient IT environment that that responds rapidly to changing business requirements.

Empower Your IT Department with Choice

Deliver business services on-demand with the freedom to choose the right industry standard hardware, application architecture, operating system, and in-house or external infrastructure to suit your business. With VMware vSphere, your IT environment is future-proofed and ready to adapt to changing requirements. You retain flexibility of choice—independent of hardware, OS, applications or providers—so you can feel confident about deploying today’s and future applications in the internal or external cloud.

Find the Edition that Fits your Needs

• VMware vSphere Standard offers basic consolidation of applications to slash hardware costs while accelerating application deployment.
• VMware vSphere Advanced protects business-critical applications against planned and unplanned downtime to provide superior application availability.
• VMware vSphere Enterprise minimizes downtime, protecting data, and automating resource management.
• VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus delivers the benefits of VMware vSphere and transforms your IT infrastructure into the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services.

Features

VMware vSphere is the industry’s first cloud operating system, transforming datacenters into dramatically simplified cloud infrastructure and enabling the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services.

Leveraging VMware’s industry-leading technology and experience, VMware vSphere 4 delivers uncompromised control, in the most efficient manner, while fully preserving customer choice.

For a comprehensive list of features download the key features summary.

Key Features

VMware vSphere comprises a number of components that transform industry standard hardware into a shared, main-frame like resilient environment with built in service level controls for all applications. The components of VMware vSphere are classified into:

Infrastructure services – These are components that comprehensively virtualize server, storage and network resources, aggregate them and allocate them precisely on demand to applications based on business priority.

Application services – These are components that provide built in service level controls to all applications running on the Cloud OS platform, regardless of application type or operating system.

VMware vCenter Server provides a central point of control for virtualization management, essential for administering infrastructure and application services, with deep visibility into every aspect of virtual infrastructure, automation of day to day operational tasks and the scalability to manage large datacenter environments.

vApps: Ensuring Seamless Application Movement Between Clouds

VMware vSphere includes support for vApp, a logical entity comprising one or more virtual machines, which uses the industry standard Open Virtualization Format to specify and encapsulate all components of a multi-tier application as well as the operational policies and service levels associated with it. Just like the UPC bar code contains all information about a product, the vApp gives application owners a standard way to describe operational policies for an application which the cloud OS can automatically interpret and execute vApps ensure that new and existing applications can move between internal clouds or to external clouds based on VMware vSphere and still retain their service levels.

Choosing Your VMware vSphere Edition

The rich capabilities of VMware vSphere are packaged into multiple editions to fit the needs of any organization. Each edition includes a hypervisor as well as features to improve availability, protect data, and simplify operations. For the hypervisor, customers can choose to deploy either VMware ESX or VMware ESXi. VMware vSphere 4 is available in English, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

Editions Comparison

VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus delivers the full range of VMware vSphere features, transforming datacenters into dramatically simplified environments, offering the next generation of flexible, reliable IT services.

VMware vSphere Enterprise includes key features for minimizing downtime, protecting data, and automating resource management.

VMware vSphere Advanced provides a strategic consolidation solution, protecting business-critical applications against planned and unplanned downtime, providing superior application availability.

VMware vSphere Standard offers an entry solution for basic consolidation of applications, reducing hardware costs while accelerating application deployment.