VMware, well situated at the top of the virtualization mountain with its Fortune 500 customers, is once again extending its hand to the small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) in an effort to thwart pricing competition from XenSource and Virtual Iron. The company has announced a new virtualization bundle designed to provide SMBs using the free VMware Server product with an easy and cost-effective way to manage i VMware, well situated at the top of the virtualization mountain with its Fortune 500 customers, is once again extending its hand to the small-to-medium sized businesses (SMBs) in an effort to thwart pricing competition from XenSource and Virtual Iron.The company has announced a new virtualization bundle designed to provide SMBs using the free VMware Server product with an easy and cost-effective way to manage it. For only $1,500, VMware is bundling together its VMware Server platform with its management tool, VirtualCenter.According to VMware, there have been over 1.2 million downloads of VMware Server since it became available in July 2006. And of that number, 70 percent of the downloads were made by SMBs. While the VMware Server was certainly powerful enough to handle most of the requests being made by the SMB market, what was missing was a way to manage these virtual host servers and virtual machines much like what its bigger sibling, VMware ESX Server, had been enjoying. SMBs using VMware Server can now use VMware VirtualCenter to gain this missing component – centralized management of their virtual infrastructure. Adding VirtualCenter for VMware Server adds the following benefits: Centralized Management – enables monitoring of virtual machines and hosts from a single interface, including the ability to set up alerts via email or pre-define actions based on thresholds such as CPU utilization. Rapid Server Provisioning – reduces time required to provision a server from hours or days down to minutes and provides pre-configured templates. Assuming a small-to-medium business may add five to 10 servers a year, the time savings quickly becomes significant. Reduced Hardware Costs – by deploying virtual machines instead of physical servers, customers do not have to purchase a new physical server every time they need to roll out a new workload or server. This can result in radically reduced total cost of hardware over a year.To quickly migrate to the virtual world, SMBs can also use the free VMware Converter Starter, a migration tool optimized to easily and quickly migrate physical systems to a virtual infrastructure. VMware Converter Starter is available at no charge and can be downloaded, here.To find out more information about the new virtualization management bundle, visit the following Web site. Software Development