Egenera announced the availability of VMware virtualization on Egenera systems with full support from Egenera and its resellers. Under the companies' original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement announced in 2007, customers can purchase VMware Infrastructure 3, the data center virtualization and management platform, with the Egenera BladeFrame system, a platform designed to support large-scale virtualized deployments of critical applications with high levels of availability and scalability.

The Egenera BladeFrame system combines diskless server blades with PAN Manager software, an infrastructure virtualization product that virtualizes data center infrastructure and delivers a highly available, flexible computing platform. Using VMware virtualization, customers can create and run virtual machines on the BladeFrame system to partition Egenera Processing Blade (pBlade) modules and run multiple operating systems and applications securely on a single blade. The Egenera BladeFrame system's built-in redundancy and high availability make it an ideal platform on which to run business-critical applications on virtual machines.

Egenera extends the benefits of VMware virtualization by providing:

• Automatic protection and recovery of VMware virtual machines
• Simple, three-step disaster recovery of all VMware ESX hosts
• Reduced complexity and administration of virtual machines through Egenera's I/O virtualization capabilities
• A full range of processors and memory, including both high-performance blades with up to 96 GB of memory in a 1U form factor to maximize virtual machine deployments, as well as low power consumption options to conserve costs

"VMware and Egenera offer complementary technologies. We're pleased that customers can now deploy VMware virtualization on the BladeFrame platform with the peace of mind that their investments are fully supported by Egenera," said Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions, VMware, Inc. "As our relationship grows, we see additional areas for collaboration in managing both physical and virtual assets. We hope to further extend the business value of VMware virtualization and continue providing joint solutions that enable customers to reduce operating expenses, improve business continuity, strengthen security and go green."

"VMware continues to lead the virtualization market with solutions that support production workloads and help customers consolidate hardware resources. The BladeFrame system's built-in N+1 failover and simple, reliable disaster recovery capabilities make it an ideal platform to extend VMware virtualization deployments," said Pete Manca, CTO and executive vice president of engineering, Egenera, Inc. "We continue to explore opportunities for future collaboration with VMware and are pleased to be able to fuse two best-of-breed solutions for a more efficient and agile enterprise data center."