VMware Launches Two New Products, vCenter and Go

VMware will be announcing two new products today at its annual virtualization conference in San Francisco, underway this week. The first product is actually an application suite called vCenter, designed to supplement its cloud computing offering vSphere 4 with a number of tools for the enterprise market. The other big announcement, VMware Go, will be a completely new product aimed at the other end of the market, allowing small and medium businesses to test for free if virtualization is a necessity for them.

The VMware vCenter application suite is designed to help enterprises manage their data centers that use the vSphere cloud operating system by automating such tasks as monitoring or provisioning. The software suite will be sold with a per processor license and includes several tools like AppSpeed for service level reporting, CapacityIQ to handle resource management, Site Recovery Manager for automated recovery and others. Vcenter is expected to ship in 2010.

VMware Go is a new tool designed to give small or medium-sized businesses a simple way to use and install a form of virtualization for their applications. The tool will be free and is designed to offer users who have no experience virtualization software to deploy VMware's free ESXi hypervisor. The hypervisor is already deployed by hundreds of thousands around the world but it's not very easy to be installed or managed by a non-trained person.

"SMBs stand to benefit tremendously from virtualization," Dan Chu, vice president of emerging products and markets at VMware, said. "VMware Go will simplify virtualization for SMBs to a few easy online steps. We want SMBs who may be sitting on the fence to realize all the benefits of virtualization without burdening their limited IT resources."

VMware is pushing hard especially in the cloud computing sector, having recently acquired SpringSource, a Java development and management software and services provider. The company plans to use SpringSource's tools with its own line of virtualization software, mainly its vSphere 4, to offer a complete cloud-based solution.