VMware vSphere For Enterprise
Virtualization for Enterprises

Overview:

VMware vSphere® is the industry-leading virtualization platform for building cloud infrastructures. vSphere enables users to run business-critical applications with confidence and respond to their business faster. vSphere accelerates the shift to cloud computing for existing datacenters, while underpinning compatible public cloud offerings, paving the way to the only hybrid cloud model.

Used by more than 250,000 customers—including all the Fortune Global 100—and leveraging more than a decade of industry-leading VMware® technology, vSphere provides unparalleled agility, control and efficiency while fully preserving customer choice.

View vSphere Demo

Key Benefits

• Efficiency through utilization and automation - Achieve high consolidation ratios and improve hardware utilization from 5 percent to 15 percent to 80 percent or more—without sacrificing performance.
• Dramatically lower IT costs - Reduce capital expenditures by up to 70 percent and operational expenditures by up to 30 percent to achieve 20–30 percent lower IT infrastructure costs for each application running on vSphere.
• Agility with control - Respond quickly to changing business needs without sacrificing security or control, and deliver zerotouch infrastructure with built-in availability, scalability and performance guarantees for all business-critical applications running on vSphere.
• Freedom of choice - Use a common, standards-based platform to leverage existing IT assets alongside next-generation IT services, and enhance vSphere through open APIs with solutions from a global ecosystem of leading technology providers.

IT Challenges are Business Challenges

In today's technology-driven environment, business agility depends on IT agility. But for many organizations, the potential business value of information technology has become trapped within traditional IT infrastructures that are too rigid, costly and complex to keep up with the pace of real-time business. In fact, most IT organizations spend 70–80 percent of their time and budget just "keeping the lights on," leaving little time to innovate or support strategic business initiatives. With users demanding faster response times, and management demanding lower costs, organizations need a better strategy.

Cloud Computing: A New Model for IT

To break this cycle so that organizations can transform IT from a cost center to a strategic asset that energizes the business, a new model for IT services is emerging: cloud computing. Cloud computing is an approach to IT that leverages the efficient pooling of resources to create an on-demand, self-managing virtual infrastructure that can be allocated dynamically as a service. This approach abstracts applications and information from the complexity of underlying hardware infrastructure, so IT organizations can focus on business needs and strategic innovation.

VMware Provides a Pragmatic Path to the Cloud

As the global leader in virtualization, VMware is charting an evolutionary course to cloud computing that can accommodate the applications of today and the cloud-based IT services of tomorrow. Working in concert with industry leaders, VMware is helping organizations of all sizes move beyond the limitations of traditional IT and revolutionize the way IT serves the business.

Using vSphere:

vSphere is an enterprise-class solution that more than 250,000 organizations of all sizes use to consolidate and optimize existing IT assets, improve business continuity, streamline IT operations and deliver IT as a service.

Consolidate & Optimize IT Hardware

vSphere enables IT organizations to delay costly and disruptive datacenter expansion projects by consolidating more virtual machines on a single physical server without sacrificing performance or throughput.

Customers also use vSphere to create powerful multicore virtual machines and virtual machine clusters that span multiple physical servers to support even the most demanding applications.

In addition, vSphere reduces the complexity of hardware management through comprehensive virtualization of server, storage and networking hardware. On average, vSphere customers can slash IT capital expenses by more than 70 percent and IT operating costs by more than 30 percent.

vSphere abstracts server workloads from underlying hardware to
create a single pool of resources that IT organizations can allocate
dynamically in response to changing business conditions.

Improve Business Continuity

vSphere helps organizations reduce the cost and complexity of business continuity and disaster recovery with always-on IT capabilities and layered protection against service outages and data loss.

vSphere eliminates planned downtime and maintenance windows with live migration of virtual machines and shared storage. vSphere also helps to minimize unplanned downtime with hardwareindependent failover for virtual machines. Fault tolerance capabilities provide lockstep redundancy for the most critical application loads.

In addition, organizations can leverage agentless backup and recovery capabilities to prevent data loss, with built-in deduplication to reduce data storage requirements.

Streamline IT Operations

vSphere lowers operational overhead and dramatically simplifies the management of large, geographically distributed development, QA and production IT environments that include a heterogeneous mix of applications, operating systems and hardware platforms.

vSphere also simplifies the provisioning of IT services and provides a uniform assurance of service levels regardless of physical infrastructure or the actual location of the services. This allows IT staff to move application loads from one virtual infrastructure to another without needing to reconfigure or customize policies or configurations.

Deliver IT as a Service

vSphere is the only virtualization platform that gives customers the power to realize the benefits of cloud computing while maintaining security, compliance and complete control over corporate assets.

With an array of management and automation capabilities such as advanced resource pooling, automated resource allocation, role-based administration, zero-touch infrastructure and selfservice portals for end users, vSphere dynamically aligns IT resources with business needs, making it possible to deliver IT as a utility-like service.

By adopting vSphere as an IT-as-a-service (ITaaS) platform, organizations gain the ability to transform IT from a cost center to a strategic advantage that saves energy—human, financial and environmental.

The Most Complete Virtualization Platform:

vSphere is the industry's most complete virtualization platform, with infrastructure services that transform IT hardware into a high-performance shared computing platform, and application services that help IT organizations deliver the highest levels of availability, security and scalability.

Infrastructure Services

• Compute—vSphere provides a rock-solid virtualization layer that enables organizations to create powerful multicore virtual machines and virtual machine clusters that span across hardware platforms. vSphere can boost application performance by nearly 50 percent with dynamic, automated, policy-based resource allocation. vSphere also helps customers cut IT power usage by up to 55 percent with distributed power-management capabilities that continuously and automatically optimize the power consumption of underlying server hardware.
• Storage—By enabling administrators to defer storage purchases until they are really required, vSphere helps to reduce storage expenditures by up to 50 percent. vSphere also enables on-demand expansion of virtual machine storage capacity.
• Network—vSphere brings visibility, control and scalability to virtual machine networks. Administrators can move beyond per-host network configurations and maintain continuous enforcement of network policies for virtual machines as they live-migrate from one server to another.

Application Services

• Availability—vSphere helps IT organizations ensure business continuity and prevent data loss with always-on IT capabilities such as automated failover, zero-downtime maintenance, virtual machine fault tolerance and cost-effective data protection.
• Security—IT security is inherently more complex in virtual environments. vSphere simplifies security and compliance by helping to enforce policies at the application level within logical zones in a shared environment while maintaining network segmentation of users and sensitive data.
• Scalability—vSphere makes it possible to achieve cloud-scale capacity with central management for thousands of virtual machines and hundreds of vSphere hosts. vSphere also delivers record-breaking performance for business-critical applications from Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and other leading software providers.

Open Architecture

For more than a decade, VMware has embraced an open, standards-based approach to virtualization that allows customers to leverage existing tools and infrastructure while adopting nextgeneration applications. vSphere also includes a comprehensive set of APIs for building tools and solutions that enhance and extend storage, networking, security and management capabilities.

VMware vSphere provides the most complete set of infrastructure and application services available.

The Best Platform for Cloud Infrastructures:

vSphere is the best platform for creating private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures, and the only virtualization solution that offers an evolutionary path to cloud computing. By adopting vSphere, customers can avoid "rip-and-replace" solutions in favor of a common platform they can use to make a pragmatic transition to cloud-based solutions and services.

Private Cloud Infrastructures

vSphere enables organizations to turn their existing datacenters into private clouds that can more efficiently and effectively manage existing applications as well as the next generation of flexible, on-demand IT services.

Capabilities such as resource pooling and dynamic resource allocation, centralized management and automation, and a selfservice portal for end users all help to reduce costs and increase agility while ensuring security, compliance and control over IT assets. vSphere also helps IT administrators streamline routine operational tasks to enhance service-level agreements, increase productivity and free up time for more strategic initiatives.

By adopting vSphere as a private cloud platform, IT teams can deliver IT services more flexibly and efficiently while automating key processes such as systems management and application provisioning.

Public Cloud Infrastructures

VMware partners with hundreds of hosting and service providers to enable compatible public cloud infrastructures. In the future, this will help establish vSphere as a common cloud platform so that IT as a service will span across public and private clouds through federation.

By offering customers the freedom of open standards and interoperability of applications, VMware offers the best choice for organizations that want to expand IT capacity or migrate applications to the public cloud.

A common management and infrastructure platform ensures visibility of pooled resources along with the elasticity to provide the highest service levels for applications. Through a broad ecosystem of leading cloud service providers, organizations can get VMware virtualized services, ranging from on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure to enterprise-class, production-ready offerings.

Hybrid Cloud Infrastructures

The VMware vision for cloud computing is to bridge internal resources with available external resources, enabling customers to create hybrid cloud infrastructures that span seamlessly across connected clouds, both private and public.

The model ultimately allows organizations to achieve the full benefits of cloud computing by leveraging a strategic mix of internal and external solutions for data storage, application hosting and disaster recovery while retaining full control over their IT infrastructures. Organizations that adopt private or public cloud solutions based on vSphere will be in the best position to employ this hybrid cloud model as it becomes mainstream.

vSphere provides a robust common platform for private, public and hybrid cloud infrastructures.

How To Buy:

A la carte licensing that is priced on a per CPU basis. All editions must be used in conjunction with an existing or separately purchased vCenter Server edition. Editions have specific CPU and virtual memory entitlements. If higher requirements are needed beyond these entitlements, additional licenses must be purchased. SnS is required for at least one year.

VMware vSphere Standard - SNS is Required. Each VS5 Standard edition license contributes 1 CPU and 32 GB of vRAM entitlement towards total available vRAM pool.

VMware vSphere Enterprise - SNS is Required. Each VS5 Enterprise edition license contributes 1 CPU and 64 GB of vRAM entitlement towards total available vRAM pool

VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus - SNS is Required. Each VS5 enterprise Plus edition license contributes 1 CPU and 96 GB of vRAM entitlement towards total available vRAM pool

VMware vSphere Advanced has been discontinued. One year Support is still available.

VMware vSphere 5 Standard to vSphere 5 Enterprise for 1 Processor Upgrade - vSphere 5 Enterprise SNS is Required. Original FAC or Serial Number w/active SnS required. Each VS5 Enterprise edition license contributes 1 CPU and 32 GB of vRAM entitlement towards total available vRAM pool

VMware vSphere 5 Standard to vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus for 1 Processor Upgrade - vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus SNS is Required. Original FAC or Serial Number w/active SnS required. Each VS5 Enterprise Plus edition license contributes 1 CPU and 48 GB of vRAM entitlement towards total available vRAM pool

VMware vSphere 5 Enterprise to vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus for 1 Processor Upgrade - vSphere 5 Enterprise Plus SNS is Required. Original FAC or Serial Number w/active SnS required. Each VS5 Enterprise Plus edition license contributes 1 CPU and 48 GB of vRAM entitlement towards total available vRAM pool

Support:

VMware Production Support & Subscription

Technical Support, 24 Hour Sev 1 Support -- 7 days a week.

Focused, 24-Hour Support For Production Environments

• Global, 24x7 support for Severity 1 issues
• Fast response times for critical issues
• Unlimited number of support requests
• Remote Support
• Online access to documentation and technical resources, knowledge base, discussion forums
• Product updates and upgrades

Overview

VMware Production Support is designed with your production environments in mind. Our global support centers are staffed around the clock to provide you access to our industry-leading expertise in virtualization and years of experience supporting virtual infrastructure products in real-world customer environments. We are committed to delivering enterprise-class, worldwide support with a single objective in mind: your success.

VMware Basic Support & Subscription Service

Technical Support, 12 Hours/Day, per published Business Hours, Mon. thru Fri.

Weekday Support for Test, Dev and Non-Critical Deployments

• Global, 12x5 access to support
• Unlimited number of support requests
• Remote Support
• Online access to documentation and technical resources, knowledge base, discussion forums
• Product updates and upgrades

Overview

VMware Basic Support is designed for non-critical applications and platforms that require support during normal business hours. Our global support centers have been strategically placed to provide you with fast and efficient access to the support center in your region. Each center is staffed with engineers that can provide industry-leading expertise in virtualization and years of experience supporting virtual infrastructure products in real-world customer environments. We are committed to delivering enterprise-class, worldwide support with a single objective in mind: your success.

Feature	Production Support	Basic Support
Hours of Operation	24 Hrs/Day 7 Days/Wk 365 Days/Yr 1	12 Hrs/Day Mon–Fri 1
Length of Service	1 or 3 Years	1 or 3 Years
Product Updates	Yes	Yes
Product Upgrades	Yes	Yes
Products Supported	All Products (excluding VMware Fusion and Player)	All Products (excluding VMware Fusion and Player)
Method of Access	Telephone/ Web	Telephone/ Web
Response Method	Telephone/ Email	Telephone/ Email
Remote Support	Yes	Yes
Access to VMware Web site	Yes	Yes
Access to VMware Discussion Forums and Knowledge Base	Yes	Yes
Max Number of Support Admins per Contract	6	4
Number of Support Requests	Unlimited	Unlimited
Target Response Times Critical (Severity 1 Major (Severity 2) Minor (Severity 3) Cosmetic (Severity 4)	30 minutes or less: 24x7 4 business hours 8 business hours 12 business hours	4 business hours 8 business hours 12 business hours 12 business hours
Business Hours North America and Latin America Alaska, Hawaii South America (NASA) Europe, Middle East, Africa (EMEA Asia, Pacific Rim, Japan (APJ) Australia/New Zealand	Monday - Friday 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (local time zone) 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (PST/PDT) 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (EST/EDT) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (GMT/GMT+1) 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. (Singapore Time) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Sydney AET)	Monday - Friday 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (local time zone) 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (PST/PDT) 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (EST/EDT) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (GMT/GMT+1) 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. (Singapore Time) 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (Sydney AET)

1Hours of operation for Gemstone are Monday - Friday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (PST/PDT) globally.
1Hours of operation for VMware Go Pro and vCenter Protect products are 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (CST/CDT), except holidays.
1Hours of operation for VMware IT Business Management and IT Financial Management are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. (EST/EDT/GMT) except holidays.
1Hours of operation for Socialcast are 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. (PST/PDT).

Documentation:

Download the VMware vSphere Brochure (PDF).

Download the What's New in VMware vSphere 5? (PDF).