Virtualization solutions company VMware has announced a steep discount of up to 50 percent on its vSphere bundle, valid through June 15. While VMware cautioned that exact prices may vary depending on resellers and geographic location, smaller businesses yet to make the leap could well be looking at jumping onto the virtualization bandwagon for less than $500 with vSphere Essentials.

The vSphere Essentials bundle includes three licenses for ESX Server 4.0 or ESXi 4.0, VMware's Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) and the basic vCenter Server for Essentials management tool. Virtual machine supports four-core VirtualSMP, as well as up to a maximum of 256GB memory for the hypervisor.

Note that vSphere Essentials does not include support, which comes at $299 per-incident, or desirable features such as VMotion and high availability support. Other promotional bundles for vSphere are also available however, for companies with more robust requirements.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at InformationWeek
- check out this article at The Register

Related Article:
VMware unveils ESX Server 4.0