Overview

Enabling Always On IT

Small businesses face many of the same IT challenges as larger businesses, trying to accommodate increasing demand for new IT capabilities and services. Small businesses often place even greater emphasis on cost savings and on protecting business critical systems and data, since shrinking IT staff and budgets and a “do more with less” mantra make it extremely difficult to simultaneously maintain day-to-day business operations (keeping the lights on) and invest in new strategic projects that can yield longer-term efficiencies to help the business grow.

VMware vSphere for small business is the most cost effective way to enable Always On IT — the high availability, reliability, and manageability of enterprise-class operations optimized for small and midsized businesses.

Slash Capital and Operational Costs

Slash capital and operational costs through consolidating servers and containing additional hardware spend. VMware virtualization delivers improved utilization of their servers, resulting in fewer resources to manage, power, store, and buy — enabling small businesses to increase utilization rates for x86 servers from 5-15 percent up to 60-80 percent. Utilize existing IT resources by consolidating all existing workloads onto significantly less physical servers. Many organizations achieve consolidation ratios of more than 15:1, while leveraging remaining servers for the deployment of new applications and business continuity solutions.

Enhance Staff Productivity and Business Responsiveness

VMware vSphere solutions are easy to deploy, use, and manage. Free your IT staff from menial tasks with VMware vSphere’s management automation capabilities, enabling them to take a more strategic role in supporting business needs. Now you can provision new applications in minutes, not weeks, and accelerate change request response times from hours or days to just minutes.

Protect your Applications and Data

Keep your business up and running with automated back up, application availability and disaster recovery across physical sites.

VMware vSphere helps small businesses protect critical data and applications that keep the business running with zero-downtime hardware maintenance. VMware vSphere enables small businesses to test and deploy more applications by optimizing pre-production staging environments, resulting in less downtime for the applications that run and drive the business.

Find the Edition that Fits your Needs Whatever Your Size and Budget

• VMware vSphere Essentials provides an all-in-one solution for small offices to consolidate and manage many application workloads while reducing hardware and operating costs with a low up-front investment.
• VMware vSphere Essentials Plus adds high application a vailability and data protection for a complete server consolidation and business continuity solution for the small office IT environment.

Features

Designed especially for small IT environments with fewer than 20 physical servers, the Essentials and Essentials Plus editions of VMware vSphere 4 deliver enterprise-class capabilities in a cost-effective solution packages for organizations that want optimize and protect their IT assets with minimal up-front investment. By adopting vSphere Essentials, customers can more effectively utilize server, network and storage resources dynamically as a single pool or “internal cloud” to protect business-critical applications and data. The result is an Always On IT environment that is more cost-effective, resilient and responsive to business needs.

Key Components of vSphere Essentials Editions

• VMware ESX and VMware ESXi provide a robust, production-proven, high performance virtualization layer that allows multiple virtual machines to share the computing, networking and storage resources of a single physical server.
• VMware vCenter Server for Essentials provides rapid provisioning, centralized management and performance monitoring, with physical-to-virtual (P2V) machine conversion, wizard-based deployment and a host of other features.
• VMware vCenter Update Manager provides automated patch and update management for VMware ESX hosts, as well as for virtual machines running select versions of Windows and Linux.
• VMware High Availability (HA) provides hardware-independent failover for virtual machines on VMware ESX hosts without the cost or complexity of traditional solutions for physical systems.
• VMware Data Recovery provides simple, cost effective, agentless backup and recovery for virtual machines that optimizes backup storage usage and complements existing data protection solutions for backup and archival to tape.

High-Performance Server Virtualization

• Record-breaking performance for resource-intensive workloads
• Ability to configure virtual machines with up to 4 virtual CPUs each
• Advanced virtual machine memory management capabilities
• Support for 64-bit server hardware with up to 512GB of physical RAM

Integrated High Availability and Data Protection

• Hardware-independent virtual machine failover with VMware HA
• NIC teaming and HBA multipathing to protect against hardware failures
• Efficient, integrated backup with VMware Data Recovery
• Support for all major third-party backup solutions

Centralized Management Capabilities

• Rapid wizard-based provisioning and virtual machine templates
• Automated patch management with VMware vCenter Update Manager
• Operational automation with task scheduling and alerts
• Integrated physical-to-virtual machine conversion capabilities

Security and Control

• Integrated network security and firewall protection for virtual machines
• VMware VMsafe™ security APIs for third-party security products
• Role-based access control and integration with Microsoft Active Directory
• SSL encryption for secure remote access to VMware ESX and ESXi hosts

Broad Hardware and Software Interoperability

• Compatibility with the widest range of server hardware in the industry
• Certified integration with Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, IBM, NEC, and Sun servers
• Certified support for SATA, NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage equipment
• Support for broadest range of 32- and 64-bit x86 server operating systems
• Ability to run any standard software application without modification

Editions Comparison