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IBM to Ship Eval Copies of VMware With Blades

IBM and VMware announced Wednesday that the computer giant will ship six-month trial versions of VMware’s virtualization products with its blade servers.

Under the agreement, customers who purchase IBM eServer BladeCenter servers will receive evaluation copies of VMware’s ESX Server, Virtual SMP and VirtualCenter with VMotion products.

“Blades by themselves or virtualization software by itself are less valuable than the two together,” says Brian Byun, vice president for alliances at Palo Alto, Calif.-based VMware.

According to a VMware company statement, ESX Server is VMware’s data center virtual infrastructure software for partitioning, consolidating and managing computing resources, while Virtual SMP enables virtual machines to span multiple physical processors. VirtualCenter provides a central point of control for virtual computing resources, and VMotion lets running virtual machines to be migrated for dynamic load balancing and zero-downtime maintenance.

Each blade comes with two licenses for all of VMware’s software. “Customers can [use the two licenses to] experience the ability to move a database server to another server, completely transparent to the end users,” Byun adds. That enables customers to experience the benefits of being able to perform software upgrades without having to wait for the weekend when users aren’t working.

About the Author

Stuart J. Johnston has covered technology, especially Microsoft, since February 1988 for InfoWorld, Computerworld, Information Week, and PC World, as well as for Enterprise Developer, XML & Web Services, and .NET magazines.

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