New release of VMware infrastructure claims to provide increased automation, greater levels of availability and enhanced performance.

VMware Inc., today announced the features of a new VMware Infrastructure release expected to be generally available later this year. The upcoming release of VMware Infrastructure, which will include the new VMware ESX Server 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5, is expected to allow VMware customers to streamline the management of IT environments through greater levels of automation, increase overall infrastructure availability and boost performance for mission critical workloads. The new release will also include updated packaging and pricing, including new offerings specifically targeted at midsize and smaller IT environments.

The Company's Infrastructure is VMware's third-generation, production-ready virtualization suite. The company claims that it provides a much anticipated complete solution that meets customer demand for a next generation firmware hypervisor, enhanced virtual infrastructure capabilities, and advanced management and automation solutions.

The new features in VMware Infrastructure is expected to meet the needs of a broad range of customers and IT environments - from midsize and small businesses to branch offices and corporate datacenters within global 100 corporations.

"This release builds upon nearly a decade of continuous innovation," said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions at VMware. "We continue to drive improvements across the VMware Infrastructure suite.  The new features, such as the first solution to move virtual machine disks across data stores, provide compelling value to customers of all sizes, whether they are small businesses or large enterprises."

"The new release will make our data center even more manageable and more flexible," said Kim Wisniewski, systems engineer at Curtin University of Technology. "For example, VMware Guided Consolidation will lower training costs for engineers new to VMware ESX Server and make it easier to extend virtualization throughout the organization. Also, VMware Storage VMotion will help us manage our virtual infrastructure storage lifecycles more effectively by giving us the ability to transparently move workloads away from storage needing downtime for maintenance, or dynamically rebalance storage workloads without affecting our virtual machines and the services they support."