VMware To Offer Per-Chip Pricing

As part of its efforts to enhance its server virtualization line for dual-core processors, VMware will price its software by the chip, rather than by the core.

VMware hopes its new pricing strategy will encourage customers to adopt virtualization technology, said Jeff Engelmann, executive vice president of marketing. "Our intent is to enable the marketplace to run more and more applications on a given chip," he said.

Raghu Raghuram, senior director of strategy and market development at VMware, said customers that adopt VMware to dual-core processor environments can make better use of their computing resources.

"A lot of our customers run at a utilization rate of 10 percent to 20 percent," Raghuram said. "So they buy virtualization to consolidate their servers and get immediate ROI. Dual-core processors have even more system processing resources, so they get even more ROI. We feel dual-core will be the killer app for virtualization."

VMware GSX Server 3.2, which the company released last month, now supports dual-core processor systems, said Raghuram. The company's ESX Server and VirtualCenter software will support dual-core processors soon, he said.