Integrate with
Your Infrastructure

VMware Solutions Support Your Entire IT Infrastructure

VMware ESX is the most broadly deployed and trusted virtualization platform in the world. By working proactively with nearly 700 technology partners, we have created a level of ecosystem support that gives customers peace of mind knowing that VMware solutions integrate well with their existing technology investments.

When selecting among various virtualization offerings, you should select one that supports all your workloads, is supported by more applications and operating systems, and works on the hardware you currently have. If your virtualization solution only supports a subset of your applications/operating systems/hardware, then two things happen. One, you are unable to fully realize the benefits of treating your datacenter as a seamless pool of resources rather than as separate, contained, physical servers. Two, you end up complicating your datacenter with multiple silos of virtualization, each only supporting its preferred applications—for example, Hyper-V favors Windows (especially Windows Server 2008), Xen supporting Linux, and Oracle supporting Oracle.

Only VMware solutions can support your entire IT infrastructure, allowing you to simplify your datacenter by standardizing on one virtualization solution for all your workloads and existing infrastructure. The comparison is pretty simple, do you want one solution that meets all your requirements, VMware, or do you want multiple offerings - Microsoft, Novell, Citrix, Oracle—that each supports only a subset of your requirements?

• Benefit from Broad Hardware Support
• VMware Supports the Largest Number of Guest Operating Systems
• Gain Access to Broad Application Support
• VMware Partner Support Programs

Benefit from Broad Hardware Support

VMware works closely with system OEMs and peripheral manufacturers to certify VMware ESX with their hardware—usually delivering certification on or shortly after those products are first released. See the VMware Certified Compatibility Guides for full details on hardware and device support.

While other virtualization platform vendors may claim they don’t need a hardware compatibility list because they use generic general purpose operating system drivers, this claim is not accurate. For instance, both Citrix XenServer and Virtual Iron have hardware compatibility lists (HCL)—both of which are far smaller than VMware’s HCL. Microsoft claims that they a very big HCL because they can use the same Windows Server 2008 drivers for Hyper-V deployments. However, Windows drivers have traditionally been the major root cause when it comes to Windows instabilities.

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VMware Supports the Largest Number of Guest Operating Systems

VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5 supports far more guest operating systems than any other bare-metal virtualization platform. VMware ESX/ESXi’s superior performance with unmodified (fully virtualized) guests, made possible by our exclusive binary translation technology, means that ESX/ESXi can run off-the-shelf operating systems with near-native performance. Other hypervisors suffer serious performance degradation with unmodified guests. VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5 also supports transparent paravirtualization for guest operating systems, which allows a single binary version of the operating system to run either on native hardware or on a hypervisor in paravirtualized mode. This means that support for paravirtualization interfaces is compiled into the kernel, and is present even when the kernel is running on native hardware. Working with members of the Linux community, including IBM, Red Hat, and XenSource, VMware co-defined paravirt_ops, an open-interface standard for paravirtualizing Linux guests.

We support all guest operating systems in a consistent, unbiased manner. For example, VMware ESX supports 4-way virtual SMP for each guest (unless the guest’s SMP support on a physical machine is for fewer CPUs, like XP and Vista which are 2-way only). In contrast, Microsoft Hyper-V only supports 4-way vSMP on Windows Server 2008 guests. Most other guests on Hyper-V will be limited to one virtual CPU.

See the VMware Guest Operating System Installation Guide for full details on guest support.

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Gain Access to Broad Application Support

More and more ISVs test their software on VMware even before they release it. In fact, SAP AG announced full support for its solutions in 64-bit Windows- and Linux-based production environments running on VMware® ESX, the first and so far only virtualization platform to earn this distinction.

See a list of major global software vendors that broadly support customers running their applications in and with VMware environments, including:

Adobe Avaya BEA Systems BMC Software Borland Software Corp. Cisco Systems Cognos Computer Associates Dell EMC Software HP i2 IBM JBoss Juniper Networks, Inc.

LANDesk Legato McAfee Microsoft MySQL Novell SUSE Opsware Oracle Red Hat Research in Motion SAP Sun Microsystems Sybase Symantec TIBCO Software Inc.

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VMware Partner Support Programs

We support deep integration of the VMware Infrastructure platform with third party management tools and solutions through APIs and SDK products aimed at different developer communities and target platforms. Our technology partners have access to VMware engineering resources and product source code to support deeply integrated VMware Infrastructure extensions.

VMware’s Infrastructure APIs and SDKs expose every control, performance and monitoring feature offered by VMware vCenter Server so third parties can build in support for every aspect of VMware Infrastructure, including VMotion, DRS and HA. This has led to broad industry support for management integration with VMware Infrastructure. Each API/SDK is intended for different developer communities and target platforms.

• VMware Infrastructure SDK
• VMware CIM APIs
• VI Perl Toolkit
• VI Windows Toolkit (PowerShell)
• Virtual Disk Development Kit
• VMware Guest SDK
• VMware VMCI SDK

We offer in-depth VMware SDK and API technical resources to developers.

Over 550 member organizations in our Technology Alliance Partner Program offer a wide range of products, solutions, training, consulting and services to VMware Infrastructure users. Our Technology Alliance Partners have been essential to the rapid adoption of VMware Infrastructure worldwide.

The VMware Technology Alliance Program supports VMware ecosystem partners with resources ranging from source code access with our Community Source Program, to sales and marketing assistance.

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