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IBM promotes virtualisation on blades

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 23 Mar 2005 15:20 GMT

IBM will bundle a six-month evaluation version of VMware's ESX Server product and other software with its blade servers, the companies plan to announce on Wednesday. The software lets a single server run multiple operating systems simultaneously in separate software foundations called virtual machines. Other VMware software included in the promotion lets one virtual machine be paused, transferred from one computer to another, then restarted, a handy feature for blade servers, which are grouped together in a shared chassis.

Jeff Benck, vice-president and business line executive of IBM eServer BladeCentre, claimed that the deal with VMWare would benefit customers by letting them experience virtualisation.

"Not only can they increase the utilisation of their individual server resources, but they can increase the utilisation and flexibility of their complete infrastructure," said Benck. "This enhances application availability, speeds deployment and reduces overall operating costs — key needs for delivering an enterprise class x86 infrastructure platform."

IBM is one of the biggest business partners of VMware, an EMC subsidiary. At the same time, though, IBM is supporting development of Xen, an open source competitor to VMware.