VMware announced new relationships with original design manufacturers (ODMs) ASUS, Gigabyte, Inventec and Tyan, adding to VMware’s current relationship with Supermicro announced in February 2008.

The relationships will enable channel partners and system builders worldwide to make virtualization available to a broader range of customers by certifying a wide range of one-, two- and four-socket server systems as well as blade servers for the VMware virtualization platform. This provides customers of all sizes even greater flexibility when selecting the servers most suited to their needs. The vendors are certifying their server systems for the VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisor, with certified systems expected to be available later this year.

“As companies worldwide adopt virtualization in growing numbers, we continue to expand our partner ecosystem to provide customers with greater hardware choices,” said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware. “Working with the ODM community, we are helping our channel partner and system builder ecosystem bring new options for offering the transformative business advantages of VMware virtualization to a broader range of customers. Organizations of all sizes will benefit from these new relationships, particularly small and medium businesses looking for cost-effective ways to get more value from their investments, better protect their systems and data, and improve staff productivity.”

The VMware ESX hypervisor is the core production-proven VMware virtualization technology, used by tens of thousands of customers worldwide, including all of the Fortune 100 and 92 percent of the Fortune 1000. VMware ESX delivers the highest scalability, reliability and performance for running demanding applications, and it is rigorously tested and certified for more than 250 different types of servers, 60 operating systems, 260 storage arrays, and 75 applications, making it a deployable and trusted virtualization platform in the world. VMware ESX is cost efficient – its advanced resource scheduling and unique transparent memory management techniques often deliver twice the consolidation ratios of competing technologies.

The VMware ESXi hypervisor is the industry’s smallest hypervisor (32MB), enabling high levels of security and reliability, and it is the only OS-independent virtualization platform. VMware ESXi delivers single-server consolidation with fast and easy deployment—the first virtual machine can operate within minutes of booting a server with pre-configured and optimized hardware configurations.

Customers can upgrade from VMware ESXi to VMware’s datacenter virtualization and management suite, VMware Infrastructure 3, when they are ready to move from server consolidation to the next stages of virtualization. VMware Infrastructure 3 provides the capability for automatic load balancing, business continuity and power management and the ability to move a virtual machine across physical machines to minimize service interruption. VMware Infrastructure 3 is also compatible with VMware’s desktop virtualization and management solutions, as well as VMware’s suite of automation solutions for the virtual datacenter.