VMware and HP announced VMware’s ultra-thin hypervisor software, VMware ESX 3i, is expected to be broadly integrated and available beginning March 31, 2008, on 10 models of HP ProLiant servers. The joint offering helps customers adopt virtualization with greater speed and simplicity. Virtualization helps companies share and pool technology resources to better optimize their datacenters, resulting in greater flexibility to meet business demands and business pressures to reduced costs.

VMware ESX 3i for HP ProLiant features VMware virtualization capabilities with full support for HP System Insight Manager, the rich set of server management tools that come standard with HP ProLiant servers. This integrated offering enables customers to deploy VMware’s base hypervisor within minutes of booting up a ProLiant server, providing greater speed and simplicity for customers new to virtualization, as well as increased capacity expansion for customers who are already use VMware’s datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3.

In addition, HP and VMware have worked together to make available software bundles that combine the VMware Infrastructure 3 software suite and additional automation products, with HP Insight Control Environment. These bundles offer customers a complete solution for seamless physical and virtual platform management.

“We are excited to work with HP to simplify datacenter management by pre-installing and pre-configuring VMware ESX 3i on HP ProLiant systems,” said Diane Greene, president and chief executive officer, VMware. “Today’s announcement is a major step forward in accelerating the adoption of virtualization by combining our respective strengths: HP’s global footprint with the ProLiant platform and rich heritage in platform manageability, and VMware’s portfolio of products for datacenter virtualization, desktop virtualization, and management and automation solutions for both the datacenter and desktop.”

“These unified offerings from HP and VMware help customers reduce costs and simplify the management and automation of virtual environments, leading to improved quality of the services that customers deploy,” said James Mouton, general manager and senior vice president, Industry Standard Servers, HP. “The combination of HP’s hardware and management tools with VMware’s industry-leading virtualization solutions delivers a truly differentiated experience. We are committed to supporting our customers’ needs for virtualized environments.”