VMware vSphere For Small Business

Overview:

Leverage the power of virtualization by fully utilizing existing IT resources to deploy new applications, improve availability and ensure business continuity. Dramatically reduce capital and operating costs while increasing IT staff efficiency with VMware vSphere, the most trusted and reliable virtualization platform in the industry. VMware vSphere delivers Always On IT to small businesses, bringing the high availability, performance and reliability of the VMware platform together with cost-effective packages designed for small IT environments.

• Decrease capital and operational costs through server consolidation and energy efficiency
• Enhance IT staff productivity through simplifying management and automating of IT operations
• Deliver Always On IT, ensuring business continuity through high application availability, data protection, and disaster recovery

Benefits

• Reduce IT hardware and operating costs.
• Simplify management and boost IT staff productivity.
• Ensure business continuity, delivering Always On IT.
• Improve service levels and application quality.
• Strengthen security and data protection.

Enabling Always On IT

Small businesses face many of the same IT challenges as larger businesses, trying to accommodate increasing demand for new IT capabilities and services. Small businesses often place even greater emphasis on cost savings and on protecting business critical systems and data, since shrinking IT staff and budgets and a “do more with less” mantra make it extremely difficult to simultaneously maintain day-to-day business operations (keeping the lights on) and invest in new strategic projects that can yield longer-term efficiencies to help the business grow.

VMware vSphere for small business is the most cost effective way to enable Always On IT – the high availability, reliability, and manageability of enterprise-class operations optimized for small and midsized businesses.

Slash Capital and Operational Costs Slash capital and operational costs through consolidating servers and containing additional hardware spend. VMware virtualization delivers improved utilization of their servers, resulting in fewer resources to manage, power, store, and buy – enabling small businesses to increase utilization rates for x86 servers from 5-15 percent up to 60-80 percent. Utilize existing IT resources by consolidating all existing workloads onto significantly less physical servers. Many organizations achieve consolidation ratios of more than 15:1, while leveraging remaining servers for the deployment of new applications and business continuity solutions.

Enhance Staff Productivity and Business Responsiveness

VMware vSphere solutions are easy to deploy, use, and manage. Free your IT staff from menial tasks with VMware vSphere’s management automation capabilities, enabling them to take a more strategic role in supporting business needs. Now you can provision new applications in minutes, not weeks, and accelerate change request response times from hours or days to just minutes.

Protect your Applications and Data

Keep your business up and running with automated back up, application availability and disaster recovery across physical sites.

VMware vSphere helps small businesses protect critical data and applications that keep the business running with zero-downtime hardware maintenance. VMware vSphere enables small businesses to test and deploy more applications by optimizing pre-production staging environments, resulting in less downtime for the applications that run and drive the business.

Find the Edition that Fits your Needs Whatever Your Size and Budget

• VMware vSphere Essentials provides an all-in-one solution for small offices to consolidate and manage many application workloads while reducing hardware and operating costs with a low up-front investment.
• VMware vSphere Essentials Plus adds high application availability and data protection for a complete server consolidation and business continuity solution for the small office IT environment.

What is vSphere:

Designed especially for small IT environments with fewer than 20 physical servers, the Essentials and Essentials Plus editions of VMware vSphere™ 4 (“vSphere”) deliver enterprise-class capabilities in a cost-effective package for organizations that want to optimize and protect their IT assets with minimal up-front investment.

By adopting ere Essentials, customers can more effectively utilize server, network and storage resources dynamically as a single pool or “internal cloud” to protect business-critical applications and data. The result is an Always On IT environment that is more cost-effective, resilient and responsive to business needs.

Customers use VMware vSphere Essentials to:

• Contain and consolidate server hardware.
  Achieve consolidation ratios of well over 15:1, and improve hardware utilization from 5-15 percent to as much as 80 percent or more—without sacrificing application performance or throughput.
• Maximize application availability and protect information assets.
  Ensure “always on” continuity of IT operations with the rock-solid reliability of VMware® ESX™ and ESXi™, along with integrated backup, recovery and failover features.
• Streamline management and enhance productivity.
  Provision new applications in minutes in minutes instead of days or weeks, monitor virtual machine performance, and automate patch and update management.
• Optimize software testing and development.
  Safely test complex multitier configurations in a secure, isolated sandbox environment while allowing test and development teams to share server, network and storage infrastructure.

VMware vSphere Essentials editions are all-inclusive packages that enable you to virtualize and consolidate many application workloads onto three physical servers running vSphere and centrally manage them with vCenter Server for Essentials.

What are the Key Components of VMware vSphere Essentials Editions?

• VMware ESX and VMware ESXi provide a robust, productionproven, high performance virtualization layer that allows multiple virtual machines to share the computing, networking and storage resources of a single physical server.
• VMware vCenter Server for Essentials provides rapid provisioning, centralized management and performance monitoring, with physical-to-virtual (P2V) machine conversion, wizard-based deployment and a host of other features.
• VMware vCenter Update Manager provides automated patch and update management for VMware ESX hosts, as well as for virtual machines running select versions of Windows and Linux.
• VMware High Availability (HA) provides hardwareindependent failover for virtual machines on VMware ESX hosts without the cost or complexity of traditional solutions for physical systems.
• VMware Data Recovery provides simple, cost effective, agentless backup and recovery for virtual machines that optimizes backup storage usage and complements existing data protection solutions for backup and archival to tape.

How Can I Purchase VMware vSphere Essentials?

The rich capabilities of vSphere are packaged into two editions designed exclusively for small office deployment:

• vSphere Essentials provides an all-in-one solution for small offices to consolidate and manage many application workloads while reducing hardware and operating costs with a low up-front investment.
• vSphere Essentials Plus adds high application availability and data protection for a complete server consolidation and business continuity solution for the small office IT environment.

Both editions are all-inclusive packages that enable you to virtualize and consolidate many application workloads onto three physical servers (up to two processors each) running vSphere and centrally manage them with vCenter Server for Essentials. vSphere Essentials includes a one year license subscription. Support is optional and available on a per incident basis. vSphere Essentials Plus has several Support and Subscription (SnS) offerings that are sold separately. A minimum of one year of SnS is required

Key Features:

Designed especially for small IT environments with fewer than 20 physical servers, the Essentials and Essentials Plus editions of VMware vSphere 4 deliver enterprise-class capabilities in a cost-effective solution packages for organizations that want optimize and protect their IT assets with minimal up-front investment.

By adopting vSphere Essentials, customers can more effectively utilize server, network and storage resources dynamically as a single pool or “internal cloud” to protect business-critical applications and data. The result is an Always On IT environment that is more cost-effective, resilient and responsive to business needs.

Key Components of vSphere Essentials Editions

• VMware ESX and VMware ESXi provide a robust, production-proven, high performance virtualization layer that allows multiple virtual machines to share the computing, networking and storage resources of a single physical server.
• VMware vCenter Server for Essentials provides rapid provisioning, centralized management and performance monitoring, with physical-to-virtual (P2V) machine conversion, wizard-based deployment and a host of other features.
• VMware vCenter Update Manager provides automated patch and update management for VMware ESX hosts, as well as for virtual machines running select versions of Windows and Linux.
• VMware High Availability (HA) provides hardware-independent failover for virtual machines on VMware ESX hosts without the cost or complexity of traditional solutions for physical systems.
• VMware Data Recovery provides simple, cost effective, agentless backup and recovery for virtual machines that optimizes backup storage usage and complements existing data protection solutions for backup and archival to tape.

High-Performance Server Virtualization

• Record-breaking performance for resource-intensive workloads
• Ability to configure virtual machines with up to four virtual CPUs each
• Advanced virtual machine memory management capabilities
• Support for 64-bit server hardware with up to 512GB of physical RAM

Integrated High Availability and Data Protection

• Hardware-independent virtual machine failover with VMware HA
• NIC teaming and HBA multipathing to protect against hardware failures
• Efficient, integrated backup and restore with VMware Data Recovery
• Support for all major third-party backup solutions

Centralized Management Capabilities

• Rapid wizard-based provisioning and virtual machine templates
• Automated patch management with VMware vCenter Update Manager
• Operational automation with task scheduling and alerts
• Integrated physical-to-virtual machine conversion capabilities

Security and Control

• VMware VMsafe™ security APIs for third-party security products
• Role-based access control and integration with Microsoft Active Directory
• SSL encryption for secure remote access to VMware ESX and ESXi hosts

Broad Hardware and Software Interoperability

• Compatibility with the widest range of server hardware in the industry
• Certified support for SATA, NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel storage equipment
• Support for broadest range of 32- and 64-bit x86 server operating systems
• Ability to run any standard software application without modification

Technical Specifications:

 

How to Buy:

The rich capabilities of VMware vSphere are packaged into two editions designed exclusively for small office deployments. vSphere Essentials enables server consolidation and centralized provisioning, monitoring and management to deliver immediate hardware and operational cost-savings. vSphere Essentials Plus adds in additional features for maintaining business continuity in the face of hardware failures and data loss.

Each edition is a solution bundle that includes everything required to virtualize and centrally manage many application workloads on three physical servers running vSphere. VMware vSphere 4 is available in English, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

VMware vSphere Essentials Editions

Designed especially for small IT environments with fewer than 20 physical servers, the VMware vSphere Essentials Editions deliver enterprise-class capabilities in a cost-effective solution package for organizations that want optimize and protect their IT assets with minimal up-front investment.

VMware vSphere Essentials provides an all-in-one solution for small offices to consolidate and manage many application workloads while reducing hardware and operating costs with a low up-front investment.

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus adds high application availability and data protection for a complete server consolidation and business continuity solution for the small office IT environment.

Both editions are all-inclusive packages that enable you to virtualize and consolidate many application workloads onto three physical servers running vSphere and centrally manage them with VMware vCenter Server for Essentials.

VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Bundle

VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Bundle provides an all-in-one solution for small offices to virtualize three physical servers for consolidating and managing applications to reduce hardware and operating costs with a low up front investment.

With the vSphere 4 Essentials Bundle, you can:

• Reduce server capital costs by over 50%
• Cut the deployment time of new servers from weeks to hours
• Centrally monitor and control servers and virtual machines from a single pane of glass
• Automate operations to improve IT responsiveness

VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Bundle includes:

• 3 licenses of VMware ESXi and VMware ESX (deployment-time choice)
• VMFS (Virtual Machine File System)
• 4-way Virtual SMP
• VMware vCenter Server Agent
• VMware vStorage APIs / VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)
• VMware Update Manager
• VMware vCenter Server for Essentials

Download immediately and choose your installation language: English, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

The server hosts must be managed by the vCenter Server Essentials edition that is provided with this bundle, and that same vCenter Server Essentials edition cannot be used to manage other server hosts not included with this edition.

VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Plus Bundle

VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Plus provides an all-in-one solution for small offices to virtualize three physical servers to reduce hardware costs while ensuring superior high application availability and data protection.

With the vSphere 4 Essentials Plus bundle, you can:

• Reduce capital and operating costs by over 50%
• Improve availability and uptime for business critical applications
• Cut the deployment time of new servers from weeks to hours

VMware vSphere 4 Essentials Plus includes:

• 3 licenses of VMware ESXi and VMware ESX (deployment-time choice)
• VMFS (Virtual Machine File System)
• 4-way Virtual SMP
• VMware vCenter Server Agent
• VMware vStorage APIs / VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB)
• VMware Update Manager
• VMware High Availability (HA)
• VMware Data Recovery
• VMware vCenter Server for Essentials

Download immediately and choose your installation language: English, German, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

The server hosts must be managed by the vCenter Server Essentials edition that is provided with this bundle, and that same vCenter Server Essentials edition cannot be used to manage other server hosts not included with this edition.

VMware vSphere Essentials for Retail and Branch Offices

VMware offers this vSphere 4 edition for Mid-size and Enterprise customers to virtualize their distributed small office deployments, such as their retail locations or branch offices (ROBO). It provides the flexibility to manage the remote locations locally or from a central location. The Essentials edition includes VMware vCenter Server for Essentials for locally managing up to 3 hosts and VMware Update Manager for automated host and guest patching.

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus for Retail and Branch Offices includes:

• 6P licenses of VMware ESX 4.0 or VMware ESXi 4.0 for use on up to 3 2P hosts per site
• VMware vCenter Server for Essentials (manage up to 3 hosts)
• VMware Update Manager
• VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)
• VMware Symmetric Multi Processing (vSMP)
• VMware vCenter Server Agents, with rights to centrally manage from vCenter Server Standard Edition (vCenter Server Standard Edition must be acquired separately)

Example: To virtualize 25 branch offices, purchase 1 Starter Kit and 15 Add-Ons.

Note:

• Minimum initial purchase size of 10 packages is required (1 Starter Kit includes licenses for 10 sites).
• To purchase more than 10, purchase the Add-On in increments of 1 package each.

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus for Retail and Branch Offices

VMware offers this vSphere 4 edition for Mid-size and Enterprise customers to virtualize their distributed small office deployments, such as their retail locations or branch offices (ROBO). It provides the flexibility to manage the remote locations locally or from a central location. The Essentials Plus edition includes VMware vCenter Server for Essentials for locally managing up to 3 hosts, VMware Update Manager for automated host and guest patching, VMware HA for automated VM restart in case of server failure, and VMware Data Recovery for backup.

VMware vSphere Essentials Plus for Retail and Branch Offices includes:

• 6P licenses of VMware ESX 4.0 or VMware ESXi 4.0 for use on up to 3 2P hosts per site
• VMware vCenter Server for Essentials (manage up to 3 hosts)
• VMware HA
• VMware Data Recovery
• VMware Update Manager
• VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS)
• VMware Symmetric Multi Processing (vSMP)
• VMware vCenter Server Agents, with rights to centrally manage from vCenter Server Standard Edition (vCenter Server Standard Edition must be acquired separately)

Example: To virtualize 25 branch offices, purchase 1 Starter Kit and 15 Add-Ons.

Note:

• Minimum initial purchase size of 10 packages is required (1 Starter Kit includes licenses for 10 sites).
• To purchase more than 10, purchase the Add-On in increments of 1 package each.

Documentation:

VMware vSphere for Small Business Data Sheet (.PDF)