DoSTOR June 26, 2008--VMware has found a partner to help it spread the gospel of virtualization in China. It's teamed up with the leading Chinese server maker, Inspur Servers, which will sell, distribute, and support VMware's Infrastructure suite.

CEO Diane Greene said VMware believes the alliance will allow builders of Chinese data centers to conserve energy and consolidate servers at an earlier stage than their European and American counterparts. China's rapid growth "has spurred the need for customers to adopt the best solutions for meeting business demands while enabling a green data center," she said.

"Being environmentally friendly is essential to the sutainable development of an economic society," said Sun Pishu, chairman of the Inspur Group.

"Most customers in China do not have enough virtualization deployment experience," said Cheng Chuanlong, VP of Inspur. His firm will have the right to develop virtualization solutions as well as resell and distribute VMware's. One of the first things the partnership will yield is the opportunity for Chinese IT managers to buy Inspur servers bundled with VMware Infrastructure 3, which includes VMware's ESX hypervisor, its Virtual Center for provisioning and managing virtual machines, and VMotion software for moving running virtual machines from one physical server to another.

Greene indicated that VMware is relying in Inspur to provide "the expertise in local customer requirements ... to both aggregate IT physical resources in virtual pools and automate the management of these resources."