The company also announced expanded participation in its VMware Ready Management programme. This robust ecosystem, which includes technology partners BMC, CA, Cisco, EMC, HP, IBM, Symantec and many others, extends the virtualization management capabilities of the VMware vCenter Product Family to enable integrated system management for customers of all sizes. Several of these partners are also taking VMware vCenter products to market with their own solutions through resell and OEM agreements with VMware.

VMware works with a variety of partners on complementary products and solutions that help provide customers with complete, end-to-end infrastructure solutions that manage physical and virtual resources with consistent processes across the enterprise. Combined with the VMware vCenter Product Family and VMware vSphere 4, the industry-leading virtualization platform, customers can implement solutions that protect their investments in training and existing tools while providing best-of-breed capabilities across their infrastructures.

"As customers continue their journey toward building private Clouds with VMware vSphere 4, integrated and consistent management of their mixed physical and virtual environments is a top priority", stated Brian Byun, vice president of global alliances, VMware. "We are excited to see our ecosystem partners work with VMware to integrate their solutions with the VMware vCenter family of products to deliver end-to-end management solutions for customers."

VMware works with more than 200 management and infrastructure partners who cumulatively offer more than 300 products that support or integrate with VMware vSphere 4. Many leading companies have also joined the VMware Ready Management Programme, which provides partners with full access to a rich set of functionality and integration interfaces for the VMware vCenter Product Family. The programme also provides technical qualification, integration best practices and logo usage that offer customers an easy way to identify products that comply with VMware standards to tightly integrate with or extend native VMware vCenter management capabilities. This enables customers to more quickly deploy management solutions and drive new levels of agility and automation in the data centre.