Today, VMware announced the launch of the Zimbra® Collaboration Suite Appliance, an enterprise-class email and collaboration solution delivered as a virtual appliance. Designed to run on the VMware vSphere™ platform, the Zimbra Appliance helps reduce the cost and complexity of infrastructure management.

Advancing Enterprise-Class Collaboration in the Cloud

Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance is a next generation email and collaboration solution that is designed to run on VMware vSphere, VMware’s award-winning virtualization platform. Customers have the flexibility to run Zimbra Appliance either within their own datacenter, or via one of VMware’s more than 2,000 VMware vCloud™ partners who host the application as a service. Because it is delivered as a virtual appliance, customers can deploy the application faster than traditional software deployments – within minutes instead of hours. As a result of this simplified virtual appliance model, customers and partners can manage their email and collaboration needs with fewer resources, less costs and lower risk. The Zimbra Appliance provides a personal and team cloud for the end user, administrator and datacenter.

The Zimbra Appliance leverages the best-of-breed virtualization capabilities of the VMware vSphere platform to enable dynamic provisioning and scalability, high availability, backup, and disaster recovery. As a result, customers can improve service levels by reducing the impact of planned and unplanned hardware downtime. The Zimbra Appliance also features integrated security technologies including a firewall, anti-virus and anti-spam solutions.

“We’re excited about the opportunity to provide VMware customers worldwide with Zimbra’s best-in-class email and collaboration solution paired with VMware vSphere’s leading virtualization platform,” said Jim Morrisroe, Zimbra General Manager.  “The Zimbra Collaboration Suite Appliance delivers customers secure email with the assurance that their data is protected on our VMware vSphere virtualization platform, and a collaboration solution that they can fully deploy in a matter of minutes – literally going from install to inbox in less than ten minutes.”

“Zimbra Collaboration Suite combined with VMware vSphere enables us to offer our customers the best of both worlds – a leading email and collaboration solution, running on the industry’s most complete and widely deployed virtualization platform,” said Craig McLellan, CTO at Hosting.com.  “With the addition of the Zimbra Appliance, we are able to provide additional email and collaboration options for our 30,000+ clients who count on us for their critical infrastructure services.”

For more details about this announcement, visit http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/zimbra-appliances.html

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If you are interested in learning how Zimbra email and collaboration or VMware virtualization could benefit your business, contact SUREclient Solutions and speak with one of our representatives today! 1-888-371-7873.

This week, after many rumors and much speculation, VMware officially announced plans to purchase Zimbra from the Yahoo! Corporation.

Zimbra is a powerful commercial open source email server application. One of the leading benefits of the Zimbra platform is it’s cross-platform compatibility with Windows, Linux and Mac clients. Notably, it also offers tight integration with Microsoft Outlook, which is used extensively by businesses small and large. In addition to the core email functions, Zimbra also boasts extensive shared calendaring, address books, wiki document manager, even instant messaging capabilities.

At SUREclient we have been using Zimbra internally and implementing it as an effective solution for our clients for several years. As partners with both Zimbra and VMware, this announcement comes as great news to us. While Yahoo! has made great strides increasing the market adoption of Zimbra, having the product in the hands of innovators like VMware makes the future of Zimbra brighter than ever. Assuming that VMware puts the same quality and level of research and development into Zimbra as they have put into their line of virtualization products, I can see only good coming of this business arrangement.

In addition to what this acquisition will do to enhance Zimbra, this also opens up some interesting observations concerning where the overall VMware strategy is headed as well. By investing in an email server application such as Zimbra, VMware has extended their reach from primarily a virtualization and infrastructure management provider into application platforms as well.

For more information on exactly what this means to VMware, and for an explanation of their reasoning for making this strategic move, read Steve Herrod’s (CTO at VMware) blog post – http://bit.ly/6e68rA.

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If you are interested in learning how VMware virtualization or Zimbra email and collaboration could benefit your business, contact SUREclient Solutions and speak with one of our representatives today! 1-888-371-7873.

In an announcement that hasn’t exactly come as a big surprise to the industry, Cisco, EMC and VMware have formed a Coalition to Accelerate Pervasive Virtualization and Private Cloud Infrastructures.

The coalition aims to ease adoption of virtual environments and accelerate build-outs of private cloud infrastructures with the announcement of Vblock Infrastructure Packages.

Vblock Infrastructure Packages are validated platforms of engineered, integrated IT infrastructure from Cisco, EMC and VMware, that deliver a breakthrough total cost of ownership and pervasive virtualization at a scale to meet today’s most demanding use cases.

For more details on this announcement, visit http://www.vmware.com/company/news/releases/virtual-computing-environment.html

Today VMware has released the latest version of their desktop virtualization platform, VMware Workstation 7.

VMware Workstation 7 features advanced capabilities to help developers, QA engineers, technical sales professionals, and IT administrators get up and running faster and streamline tasks that save time and improve productivity.

The first desktop virtualization product with Windows Aero support, VMware Workstation 7 also boasts 3D application support and IDE integrations with SpringSource Tools Suite and Eclipse IDE along with support for over 200 guest operating systems.

For more information about this release, visit: http://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/

Today, Microsoft releases updates to both it’s desktop and server operating systems:

Windows 7

Windows 7 marks the latest edition of the Microsoft Windows desktop workstation operating system. While its predecessor, Windows Vista, introduced quite a few new features, the Windows 7 release is a more focused, incremental upgrade to the Windows product line, geared toward being more “user-centric”, according to Microsoft. Improvements include a redesigned Windows Shell, a home networking system called HomeGroup, and other general performance improvements.

Windows 7 will be available in six different editions, but only Home Premium, Professional and Ultimate will be widely available from retail outlets. The other editions are focused on other markets, such as the developing world or enterprise use.

The Windows 7 Family Pack Upgrade edition is also available, which will license the update of three machines from any 2000 (any edition), XP (any edition), or Vista (Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium editions) to the Windows 7 Home Premium edition.

See more details at Microsoft’s website: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

Windows Server 2008 R2

Often referred to as “Windows 7 Server”, Windows Server 2008 R2 is also now available. This update to the server line of operating systems introduces several significant enhancements. New features include new virtualization features within Hyper-V, new Active Directory features, IIS 7.5, and support for 256 processors. Most notably, support for 32-bit x86 architecture processors has been removed in this release.

For more details on the new and updated features in the Windows Server 2008 R2 release, visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2008/en/us/r2-compare-features.aspx

This Monday, VMware issued the following press release announcing the availability of their new VMware vCenter CapacityIQ product:

VMware Delivers New Management Solution for Unprecedented Insight Into Datacenter Capacity – Optimizing for Reduced Waste, Overhead and Risk

PALO ALTO, Calif., October 19, 2009 — VMware, Inc. (NYSE: VMW), the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, today announced the availability of VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, a new product in the VMware vCenter Product Family that provides complete capacity management for VMware virtualized environments. VMware CapacityIQ empowers IT administrators with the necessary intelligence to be able to right-size capacity in a dynamic virtual environment. It provides unprecedented visibility into past, present and future infrastructure capacity in order to analyze what is available and what is being used; forecast what is needed; and plan when capacity will run out. As a result, VMware CapacityIQ helps eliminate infrastructure waste, reduce operational overhead and minimize business risk of outages, failures and disasters.

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ enables customers to proactively monitor capacity at multiple levels, analyze the impact of changes and forecast future needs based on consumption patterns. VMware CapacityIQ is critical for VMware customers who are interested in growing their virtual infrastructure cost-effectively –supporting server applications or virtual desktops – enabling them to:

• Reduce cost by reclaiming unused capacity. CapacityIQ proactively analyzes resource usage patterns and automatically generates a list of virtual machines that have been over-provisioned. Armed with this information, virtual infrastructure administrators can reclaim unused resources instead of purchasing additional capacity.
• Mitigate risk by modeling the effect of capacity changes. CapacityIQ helps customers avoid potential business and service disruptions by proactively modeling the impact of a planned change such as an acquisition or new application or an unplanned outage, failure or disaster.
• Deliver the right capacity at the right time. CapacityIQ keeps track of a dynamic VMware virtual environment by helping customers monitor capacity and forecast future capacity needs, helping to ensure capacity is always available to meet required service levels.

“In virtualized environments, customers can optimize performance and boost their ROIs by properly allocating resources,” said Bogomil Balkansky, VP, product marketing, server business unit, for VMware. “VMware vCenter CapacityIQ is the first product that enables customers to fully analyze their virtualized environments, identify bottlenecks and wasted resources, and plan for current and future capacity needs so they have confidence that they can meet business demands.”

“With VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, VMware is delivering a key solution for one of the most impactful areas of virtual systems management,” said Andi Mann, VP of research for independent IT analyst firm, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “Good capacity planning tools are essential for any virtualization deployment. EMA research clearly shows that this discipline contributes to higher VM densities, higher admin efficiency, better application performance, and more best practice outcomes.”

“In a virtual infrastructure where all resources are shared, optimal performance can only be achieved with the right amount of properly allocated resources,” said Mike Laskowski, solutions architect, R.R. Donnelly.  “With vCenter Capacity IQ, we can easily identify over- and under-provisioned virtual machines, helping us to reduce both waste and performance risk. CapacityIQ’s ‘what if analysis’ and reporting features help us with ongoing planning and deployment to ensure the right level of resources and the best possible ROI.”

Availability and Pricing
For more information or to purchase VMware vCenter CapacityIQ, please visit: http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-capacityiq/.

About VMware
VMware delivers solutions for business infrastructure virtualization that enable IT organizations to energize businesses of all sizes.  With the industry leading virtualization platform – VMware vSphere™ – customers rely on VMware to reduce capital and operating expenses, improve agility, ensure business continuity, strengthen security and go green. With 2008 revenues of $1.9 billion, more than 150,000 customers and 22,000 partners, VMware is the leader in virtualization which consistently ranks as a top priority among CIOs. VMware is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the world and can be found online at www.vmware.com.

VMware and VMware vCenter are registered trademarks and/or trademarks of VMware, Inc. in the United States and/or other jurisdictions. All other marks and names mentioned herein may be trademarks of their respective companies. The use of the word “partner” or “partnership” does not imply a legal partnership relationship between VMware and any other company.
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