VMware, Inc.has announced that customers purchasing the VMware P2V Migrations Jumpstart service will receive the VMware P2V Assistant product for free.

The VMware P2V Migrations Jumpstart service is an on-site consulting workshop that offers customers a proven methodology supported by VMware and its partners to move and consolidate existing physical servers into VMware virtual machines. P2V migrations are ideal for customers involved in server consolidation or legacy migration projects where recreating existing servers is not feasible or practical. The VMware P2V Assistant is an enterprise-class migration tool that lets users migrate existing physical systems ranging from Windows NT 4 to Windows Server 2003 into VMware virtual machines.

"Without VMware, migrating these machines would have taken months to years because we'd have to start from scratch," said Suraj Dalal, senior systems engineer at Guardian Life Insurance Company of America . "With VMware, it took only hours, and our systems and configurations were preserved as-is. VMware P2V Assistant really makes life so much easier."

VMware P2V Jumpstart adoption has increased by more than 500% year-over-year through June 2005 . Moreover, the number of VMware VAC partners offering Jumpstart services has increased by 67% since the start of this year, and VMware partners now account for more than 60% of all customer P2V Jumpstarts conducted.

"The success that VMware and VMware's Global VAC Partners are having with VMware P2V Jumpstart is further evidence that enterprise customers are moving their data centers broadly into VMware virtual infrastructure," said Jeffrey Engelmann, executive vice president of marketing at VMware. "As more than 10,000 enterprise customers have migrated their server environments into VMware virtual infrastructure, VMware P2V Assistant has become the most effective, well-supported and risk-free way to convert physical servers into virtual machines, thereby benefiting customers with a way to extend the life of critical applications, replacing older hardware with state-of-the-art systems and gain substantial hardware and IT operating cost efficiencies."