PALO ALTO, Calif., Dec. 12 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- VMware, Inc., the virtualization software leader, today announced that more than 60 organizations have joined VMware's co-development programs. Approximately 350 developers from VMware's ecosystem of partner organizations are actively working with VMware on co-development projects to bring VMware-enabled solutions to customers worldwide through collaborative development. These solutions include integrations for the new update of VMware Infrastructure.

    VMware's co-development initiatives include the VMware Community Source program, which enables partners to contribute to and use the source code for VMware ESX Server, as well as ongoing product engineering projects with partners that leverage VMware APIs. These co-development programs enable industry collaboration that has resulted in new value-added products and functionality optimized for VMware environments.

    "VMware is a strong supporter of industry-wide collaboration to deliver products that work with VMware Infrastructure," said Dr. Stephen Herrod, vice president of technology development at VMware. "We are investing heavily in collaborative programs that enable architectural co-design, joint software development, hardware enablement and optimization, and solution certification. These programs contribute greatly to VMware's robust partner ecosystem and result in virtualization solutions that improve computing for our mutual customers."

    The collaborative development resources offered by VMware have enabled partner organizations to develop products for VMware Infrastructure that offer increased interoperability and supportability, improved I/O capabilities, expanded storage and networking choices and improved desktop management. VMware co-development programs enable participants to work closely with VMware to develop products that further extend the value of customers' VMware deployments through enhanced functionality.

    Products developed by VMware's technology partners span a broad range of technologies. Several companies currently plan to deliver products for the new update of VMware Infrastructure, which includes VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5. The products VMware's partners have been working on are designed to provide customers with many benefits, including:

    -- Improvements in SAN manageability through NPIV

    -- Improved capability to enable customers to manage physical and virtual environments from the same console

    -- Expanded networking and storage connectivity choices such as 10Gb Ethernet support and InfiniBand enablement

    -- Support of rich multimedia content such as full motion audio and video for VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)

    -- "Five Nines" availability through expanded hardware platform support for VMware ESX Server

  Partners Discuss VMware's Co-development Programs

    "AMD has worked closely with our technology partners like VMware to optimize our Quad-Core AMD Opteron(TM) processors for virtualization with enhancements to AMD-Virtualization(TM) technology like Rapid Virtualization Indexing, which is designed to dramatically increase the performance of demanding virtualized applications," said Margaret Lewis, director, commercial solutions at AMD. "Our development efforts over time have entailed a close relationship with the VMware engineering team, enabling us to better understand the requirements of x86-based virtualization, and we look forward to continued collaboration with VMware."

    "Alongside the growing popularity of virtualized server environments, end-users are steadily increasing the number of virtual machines and workloads running on their physical host. With that, we are experiencing higher demand for 10G Ethernet and multiple 1G Ethernet as well as iSCSI offload," said Uri Elzur, senior director, advanced technology and system engineering, high-speed controller line of business at Broadcom. "As customers are demanding new performance levels of the server I/O subsystem, we are working closely with VMware, architecting new technologies, integrating and optimizing each other's products for maximum network and storage I/O performance."

    "We have worked with VMware to enable VMware ESX Server to run on Egenera's BladeFrame system, which provides a highly-available, scalable platform for customers to manage both their physical and virtual infrastructures," said Dan Busby, vice president, product management at Egenera. "This solution enables our customers to take advantage of the flexibility and transformative IT benefits of virtual infrastructure while benefiting from the throughput, agility and simplicity of the BladeFrame architecture. We expect our collaboration to continue as virtualization further evolves into a fundamental component of IT architecture."

    "EMC has been an active participant in VMware's co-development activities, most recently working together to integrate EMC's industry-leading remote replication solutions with VMware's forthcoming release of Site Recovery Manager to provide our joint customers with end-to-end disaster recovery management and automation across the entire data center. Additionally, we're working closely with VMware to test and validate turnkey solutions for applications such as Exchange, SQL and Oracle," said Chuck Hollis, vice president, technology alliances at EMC Corporation. "Exemplified by the recent integration of EMC ControlCenter 6.0 with the virtual machine discovery capabilities featured in VMware VirtualCenter, we are committed to working collaboratively with VMware to deliver seamless interoperability and integration that spans EMC's storage, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, resource management and application solution portfolios. EMC will also continue to work with VMware to provide complementary solutions for VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure and software lifecycle management."

    "The latest release of VMware Infrastructure provides enhanced capabilities to better support SAN environments, including N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV). Emulex LightPulse(R) Virtual HBA technology with industry-standard NPIV support allows customers to effectively 'virtualize' SAN connections, so that each virtual machine has independent access to its own protected storage," said Mike Smith, executive vice president, worldwide marketing at Emulex Corporation. "NPIV support is another proof point of the continued collaboration between Emulex and VMware as we continue to drive server virtualization adoption."

    "HP and VMware have collaborated since VMware's earliest days," said Scott Farrand, vice president, industry-standard server software at HP.  "The complementary technologies that have come from our work have enabled customers to streamline IT operations by pooling and sharing resources to realize dramatic cost savings in the data center. We look forward to continued co-development."

    "IBM and VMware have a long and exciting history of development collaboration, starting with VMware ESX Server in 2001," said James Northington, vice president, Systems x, systems and technology group at IBM.  "Most recently, we collaborated to extend VMware memory addressability to 256GB and we announced our intentions to support the embedded VMware ESX Server 3i on our new x3950 M2 platform featuring our eX4 scale-up technology."

    "As one of the first members of the VMware Community Source program, Mellanox has helped to establish the enablement of InfiniBand products for VMware environments for the first time in the new update of VMware Infrastructure," said Sujal Das, director, software product management at Mellanox Technologies. "VMware's co-development activities are a key enabler for creating value-added product integrations for VMware products, and we're excited to continue these efforts for our protocol-agile and unified I/O 20Gb/s InfiniBand and 10 GigE NIC products and data center customers."

    "QLogic is an active participant in the VMware Community Source program, working to develop NPIV improved I/O products based on VMware Infrastructure," said Parag Mehta, director, marketing, host solutions group at QLogic. "The enhanced, virtualization-enabled capabilities provided by VMware Infrastructure enable a broader appeal of our products as more and more customers look to deploy virtualization throughout their IT infrastructures."

    "As a longstanding member of the VMware Community Source program and an OEM partner, Stratus has worked closely with VMware to support VMware Infrastructure on Stratus' continuously available ftServer platform," said Allan Jennings, senior vice president, product and solutions development at Stratus. "The benefit for customers is increased stability as they extend their virtualized IT infrastructures to include their most business- and mission-critical business processes and applications."

    "Wyse is one of the early members of the VMware Community Source program, working closely to make thin computing in virtualized environments a reality," said Ricardo Antuna, vice president, business development and alliances at Wyse Technology Inc. "We leveraged our participation in this program to deliver solutions such as Wyse TCX Multimedia software, which allows users to experience rich video content in a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environment, benefiting our joint customers. As the first thin client vendor to have our software selected for inclusion in VMware's ESX 3.02 and the new VMware ESX Server 3.5 offering, we find VMware's Community Source program beneficial in tailoring products to better meet user demands."

    For more information on VMware's co-development activities and the VMware Community Source program, visit http://www.vmware.com/partners/alliances/programs/.

    About VMware, Inc.

    VMware (NYSE: VMW) is the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems.  Organizations of all sizes use VMware solutions to simplify their IT, fully leverage their existing computing investments and respond faster to changing business demands. VMware is based in Palo Alto, California and majority-owned by EMC Corporation (NYSE: EMC).  For more information, visit http://www.vmware.com.

    VMware is a registered trademark or trademark 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.