Judges could find no weak spots in VMware's VMware Infrastructure 3 software suite, which allows companies to optimize and manage their IT environments through virtualization. As a result, the product earned the Gold Award in SearchWinComputing.com's disaster prevention and recovery category for 2006.

VI3 virtualizes and aggregates industry-standard servers and their attached network and storage into unified resource pools. This allows VI3 users to implement a unified disaster recovery platform that lets you recover many production virtual machines in the event of hardware failure -- without investing in costly one-to-one mapping of production and disaster recovery hardware.

Judges gave the product high marks in all the Products of the Year categories, including innovation, performance, ease of integration, ease of use, functionality and value. "Nobody does virtual better than VMware," said one judge. "This new product continues its dominance in this arena by allowing live failover and centralized management."

The product's key features include the VirtualCenter management agent, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler and VMotion. These technologies aggregate a company's hardware resources into logical resource pools and allocate them to applications running on virtual machines and VMware High Availability, which relocates and restarts virtual machines; and VMware Consolidated Backup, which offloads backup to a centralized server. Said another judge, "Its backup features are excellent."

Pricing: VMware Infrastructure is available in three editions. VMware Infrastructure Starter, for SMBs and branch offices, includes VMware ESX Server with local or NAS storage; list price is $1,000 per two processors. The list price for VMware Infrastructure Standard, designed for virtualizing enterprise workloads, is $3,750 per two processors. VMware Infrastructure Enterprise is priced at $5,750 per two processors.

SearchWInComputing.com