This past Tuesday, I sat in on a webinar called “Virtualization Made Easy:Lower Virtualization TCO by 70%”

What caught my attention wasn’t the name of the webinar (does anyone market a product today that lowers TCO by a mere 30% or so?), but that it was going to be led by Eric Courville ,  COO of VM6 Software.
I worked with Eric in the early days of Platespin (now part of Novell), when he was VP of Worldwide Sales.

What I liked about this webinar was that it was informative and fast paced.
It was easy to understand what they were actually trying to sell ; they had a  definitive USP (unique selling proposition).  This is actually more unique than you would think – just sit through a few presentations from start-ups & emerging technology vendors and you’ll appreciate their messaging a bit more.

Only a small amount of  time, during the presentation, was devoted to company and management information. The handoff to the lead engineer for the technical portion & demo was smooth.

What did I learn during this 60 minutes?:

• They claim to have the best ROI of any virtualization solution
• It is a self contained product that leverages one’s existing investment that covers  storage, H/A and virtual workloads (servers and desktops). It is managed from a single “pane of glass“.
• Their appeal is to the SMB market and ROBO; they cited a number of 70% of IT budgets are spent on keeping the lights on in existing datacenters
• Markets VM6 VMex as a fully integrated “IT in a box”
• Repurposes existing server/DAS storage into a Virtual SAN
• Advanced HA (High Availability) Clustering. Active-Active.
• With their cluster technology, unlike many solutions you don’t need the same chipsets on each server; you can have AMD on one server and Intel on another server.
• Federated VDI offering removes the dependency on low latency and high bandwidth network
• Aggressive pricing: Perpetual License is $3,995 per physical host (min 2 host per site for HA) Plus 25% per year for maintenance and 7X24 support
• 30 day customer satisfaction guarantee
• Leverages Microsoft Hyper-V
• No physical SAN required
• No virtual servers are dedicated to the infrastructure
• Avoids having to learn the complexity of clustering ; 15 minutes to have cluster installed
• VMex is installed on any Windows Server 2008 compatible server.  Just standard edition; enterprise is not needed
• Recent customer quoted as saying VM6  saved them $58,000 per year vs. a conventional virtualization solution (VMware, SAN, replication software)

In conclusion, this was a good seminar to view; it seems that they have something different here.

Can VM6  really commoditize virtualization and make it available to everyone, no longer just available to the selective crowd of the datacenter?

If anyone is a VMex customer or has evaluated this product, please let us know how your experience has been.