Virtualisation to cut cost of hosted services

Virtualisation pioneer VMware makes a host of announcements

Virtualisation continued its push into the enterprise with pioneer VMware today announcing a raft of products and services, including a desktop virtualisation system for Mac users called VMware Fusion and the VMware Service Provider Programme (VSPP).

VSPP will allow third parties such as web hosting firms and managed service providers to offer virtualised infrastructure as a pay-as-you-go service. VMware said the service aims to address long-term capacity over-commitment, where firms pay for unused disk, CPU and network capacity.

VMware’s director of strategic partners, Steve Jackson, said VSPP gives hosting providers the ability to add or subtract capacity in much finer increments than before, allowing them to offer more efficient services at lower cost to firms.

Jackson said VMware is looking to offer a basic product to service providers for about £7 per virtual machine (VM) per month, and an advanced version for £20 per VM per month. “The advanced solution would enable hosting providers to offer extra features like high availability, dynamic resource profiling and automatic provisioning,” Jackson added.

On the desktop side, VMware Fusion will give users of Intel-based Mac systems the ability to run Mac, Windows, Linux, NetWare and Solaris applications simultaneously, without rebooting.

Butler Group analyst Roy Illsley said this method of virtualisation has its merits: “If you’re a software vendor then all you have to do is to wrap up the application in a self-contained kernel, which gets round the problem of operating system installs and their associated errors.”

VMware Fusion should be generally available in August, priced at £40.

Also aimed at the desktop market, VMware Player 2 allows users to run software virtual appliances under Windows or Linux operating systems. New in version 2 is Windows Vista and USB 2.0 device support, as well as two-way virtual symmetric multiprocessing.

VMware also announced that it has acquired Propero, an existing VMware partner that specialises in technology for securing connections between users and virtual desktops.

In related news, Parallels has released Parallels Desktop for Mac 3.0, which enables Windows virtual machines to run on Intel-based Mac systems. The release adds support for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics and a tool that lets users access files inside a VM, even when it is not running.