VMware Announces More Than 21,000 New Customers in the First Half of 2009 and Strong Customer Traction With VMware vSphere

VMware, Inc., the global leader in virtualization solutions from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud, announced strong customer traction for VMware's industry-leading virtualization platform. In the first half of 2009, more than 21,000 new customers have purchased VMware solutions -- equivalent to an average of 121 new customers per day. In addition, VMware vSphere™ 4 has reached more than 350,000 downloads in the first 12 weeks of general availability -- at an average rate of 140 downloads per hour. According to a recent poll on http://www.vmware.com/, approximately 75 percent of customers that responded are upgrading or plan to upgrade to VMware vSphere™ 4 within the next six months.

VMware vSphere™ 4 delivers customers the following critical benefits: offers unmatched cost savings; delivers the efficiency and performance required to run business critical applications; provides uncompromised control over application service levels, and preserves customer choice of hardware, OS, application architecture and on-premise vs. off-premise application hosting.

Unmatched Cost Savings Even Compared to So-Called "Free" Offerings
VMware vSphere™ 4 helps customers reduce capital expenses by up to 60 percent and operational expenses by an average of 33 percent. By allowing companies to make more efficient use of today's powerful servers, VMware vSphere™ 4 also enables unmatched cost savings even when compared to so-called "free" offerings.

"As a result of upgrading to VMware vSphere 4, the museum has saved $200,000 AUD on hardware procurement costs since migrating from VMware Infrastructure 3. We've also reduced our power requirements by 33 percent and have achieved a server consolidation ratio of 12:1," said Dan Collins, manager of information technology at Powerhouse Museum. "VMware vSphere 4 has also dramatically improved our infrastructure responsiveness and flexibility, and most importantly enhanced our recoverability of systems and information."

Boosted Performance and Improved Service Levels for Business Critical Applications
With VMware vSphere 4, customers are extending the benefits of virtualization to business critical applications such e-mail, database, ERP, CRM systems and others. Customers are reporting significant increases in application performance, reliability and scalability after deploying VMware vSphere™ 4.

"After seeing the benefits of virtualizing our infrastructure applications, we wanted to move our SQL database into the virtualized environment," said Roy K. Turner, server systems engineer, Frederick Memorial Hospital. "The improved performance and enhanced reliability in VMware vSphere 4 have been invaluable in exceeding our SLAs and preventing revenue loss from our mission-critical applications. VMware Fault Tolerance further improves uptime for our most critical applications by providing zero-downtime recovery from hardware failures, while VMware Data Recovery helps us easily back up and protect our critical data."

"With VMware, we've found that we can roll out new services much faster, as well as increase the reliability of existing services, while cutting the costs of doing both," said Bob Plankers, technical architect, University of Wisconsin - Madison. "With VMware vSphere 4, our infrastructure management becomes much simpler through the use of new VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch and Host Profiles. VMware vSphere 4 also increased the amount of I/O, memory, and CPU available, meaning we can virtualize nearly every workload we have."