It seems that everyone—including your customers—is interested in virtualization. Now is the time to ensure that your application is ready for optimal performance in virtualized environments by joining the Intel® Software Partner Program’s Virtualization Enabling Project.

Virtualization—running multiple virtual computers in software on a single physical machine—is moving from the enterprise data center to small and midsize businesses, thanks to the dramatic growth in computing horsepower. With the latest Intel® quad-core and dual-core processors, even small businesses can reap the benefits of virtualization. Get ahead of your customers’ questions and the competition by verifying that your software is ‘virtualization-ready’. Join the Virtualization Enabling Project offered by the Intel® Software Partner Program and get there first!

With the exponential growth in server horsepower delivered by the new generation of multi-core processors, the phenomenon of virtualization is spreading beyond the enterprise data center into your customer base. A virtual machine is a server that is implemented in software and mimics the performance of a physical server, appearing to users and applications as a separate physical server.

For example, your customer could create multiple virtual machines inside a single Intel® quad-core processor-based server. They could use one of these virtual machines as their Web server, running the Windows Server 2003* operating system; another virtual machine as their order-entry server, running an aged application that has to run on the Windows 2000* operating system; and a third virtual machine as their e-mail server, running a variant of the Linux* operating system. Users could access each of these applications as if they were running on separate physical servers; in fact, users have no knowledge about whether an application is running on a physical or virtual server.

Why would your customers want to move to a virtualized environment?

• To boost performance of legacy applications. In the case of the aged order-entry application mentioned above, customers can replicate legacy applications in multiple virtual machines to achieve performance scalability until they’re able to either rewrite the application for modern operating systems or software vendors are able to upgrade the application.
• To reduce costs. The math is obvious and irresistible—customers get multiple servers for the price of one. In the above example, the customer is able to spread the abundant compute power of a single Intel quad-core processor across four virtual machines and four different workloads. Large corporations are using virtualization to consolidate workloads onto far fewer, more fully-utilized servers in their data centers. Your customers can do the same on a smaller scale. Companies also use virtualization to reduce server provisioning and management costs.
• To increase flexibility. Companies can flexibly juggle modular workloads in virtualized environments far more easily and less expensively than they can in a purely physical machine environment, dynamically allocating computing capacity when and where it’s needed.

Your customers are hearing from colleagues and the press about the benefits of virtualization, and they will want to know if your application works in a virtual environment. While many virtual-software vendors will assure you that all applications will perform as well in a virtualized environment as in a non-virtualized or ‘native’ environment, this is not always the case. Your customers will need to understand whether your application has been tested for specific virtualized usage models, as well as relevant benchmarks when running in both native and virtualized modes. Tap into Intel’s extensive virtualization technology expertise and industry leadership to discover for yourself how your software will perform, how many users your application can support in virtualized mode, how many transactions per second your software can deliver, what the response times will be, and other key performance metrics. Before your customers ask, it’s good to find out for yourself – ‘virtualization-ready’ means faster customer demos and proofs of concept, shorter deployment cycles, and faster time-to-revenue for your business.

Intel has made it easy to discover how virtualization-ready your application is by creating the Virtualization Enabling Project. This project is an Intel® Software Partner Program offering that provides many educational and technical resources to help you understand virtualization, gives you the opportunity to verify your application’s performance in a variety of Intel® quad-core and dual-core processor-based virtual environments, and provides marketing and sales resources to help you communicate the benefits of your virtualization-ready software to your customers. Here’s the benefit breakdown, mapped to your product lifecycle:

• Plan and strategize. We offer primers, white papers, and other resources to help you quickly understand virtualization and specific Intel technologies that support virtualization. You’ll also receive previews of Intel’s product roadmap and plans for silicon features that enhance virtualization, so you can keep your applications in step with the latest hardware offerings.
• Develop and solve. Help reduce your development costs with 15 percent rebates on qualifying development system purchases, and let us guide you through the process of Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) selection, optimization of performance tunings for the latest Intel quad-core and dual-core processor-based systems, and benchmarking the metrics for your application’s performance that matter the most when running in a virtualized mode. During verification, you can use sample applications, source code, API libraries, threading analysis tools, performance analyzers, configuration tools, and more, to speed your work and give you a crystal-clear view of how your software performs in a variety of virtual environments. You can also tap into our online virtualization developer community to compare notes with colleagues around the world that are involved in the same process.
• Market and sell. Once your application is verified for Intel platforms in a virtual environment, you can access a vast array of marketing and sales resources to help you let customers know that your software has been verified as ‘virtualization-ready’ on the latest Intel quad-core and dual-core processor-based systems. Participate in a sales campaign, which gives you access to Intel-approved marketing agencies to generate awareness and demand for your solution, and help reduce your marketing costs by creating your own collateral using the Collateral Builder. Tap into marketing demo systems to showcase your solution at trade shows and other events, and make sure to list your solution in the Intel® Developer Solutions Catalog, a “who’s who” of companies developing leading-edge software for Intel platforms. Once you’re listed in the Intel Developer Solutions Catalog, you can also apply to participate in the Channel Marketplace¹, Intel’s online storefront for resellers. Here, resellers can learn about your software and join forces with you to offer complete virtualized solutions to their customers. Both of these resources are translated into multiple languages and give your company increased visibility in markets throughout the world.

Join the Virtualization Enabling Project, learn about virtualization, and start verifying your product today, before your competition beats you to it. Here’s what you need to do:

• If you’re not already a member, join the Intel Software Partner Program at www.intel.com/partner.
• If you’re a current program member, join the Virtualization Enabling Project.

That’s all there is to it!

For more information, visit: www.intel.com/partner.

Copyright © 2007 Intel Corporation. All rights reserved.

¹Limited availability in some geographic regions.