Most IT organizations are already using virtualization to consolidate their infrastructure, reduce costs and improve service levels through live migration and automated failover of virtual machines. Many have already extended these benefits to their most demanding applications, including enterprise databases and high-volume business, middleware and productivity applications. Others are interested in virtualizing their business-critical applications but want to be absolutely certain they can deliver the same or better performance, scalability and availability in a virtualized environment.

In the vast majority of cases, they can. VMware® vSphere™ 4 and the Next Generation Intel® Xeon® processor-based server platform for the expandable server segments deliver better virtualization performance than previous generations, with lower overhead and improved scalability. With VMware® Enhanced VMotion,™ the combined solution also supports production-quality virtual machine migration for enterprise-class availability and disaster recovery. With these advancements, most enterprise applications, including 95 percent of production databases, can be supported as well or better in a virtualized environment than on dedicated physical servers, and at much lower cost.