The agreement extends by three years an alliance that began in 2002 and involves IBM offering VMware’s VirtualCenter, VMotion, ESX Server and Virtual SMP software products on its eServer xSeries and BladeCenter systems worldwide.
Palo Alto, California-based VMware has placed itself at the heart of multiple server vendors’ virtualization strategies with its virtualization software for Intel Corp processor-based servers. The company’s ESX Server product is used to create multiple virtual servers on top of the Intel Architecture, with VirtualCenter for management and provisioning, VMotion for zero-downtime maintenance, and Virtual SMP for creating single virtual machines that span multiple physical processors.
Strong growth combined with top level partnerships with the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Fujitsu Siemens Computers, brought VMware to the attention of storage giant EMC, which snapped it up for $635m in late 2003 to boost its storage virtualization technologies.
EMC is well aware of the importance of VMware’s relationships with the larger server vendors, however, and has vowed to maintain VMware’s independence. The extended relationship with IBM is a significant confirmation of that plan, and also confirms VMware’s importance to IBM.
The company has recently been talking up its Virtualization Engine cross-platform virtualization strategy, which includes advanced systems micro-partitioning, a single point of control and management for IBM and non-IBM systems, workload management and provisioning tools, grid capabilities, and IBM TotalStorage Open Software to virtualize and centralize the management of storage.
VMware is an important part of that strategy. Our partnership with VMware complements the IBM on-demand strategy by bringing partitioning to the xSeries and Intel-based BladeCenter product lines, said Leo Suarez, vice president, IBM eServer xSeries products. Combined with IBM Virtualization Engine, VMware extends IBM’s virtualization capability across the entire xSeries and Intel-based BladeCenter servers.
