Fortisphere announced that its Virtual Essentials product suite has achieved "Certified for Windows Server 2008" status and will support Hyper-V, Microsoft's next-generation hypervisor-based server virtualization technology. Designed for line-of-business and mission-critical applications, the Certified for Windows Server 2008 program demonstrates that Fortisphere has met the highest technical bar for stability, security, reliability, availability and platform compatibility.

A Microsoft Certified Partner and member of the Microsoft Accelerator Program, Fortisphere is committed to providing the automation, visibility and control required for effective policy-based management of heterogeneous virtual infrastructures. As organizations deploy offerings from multiple vendors such as Microsoft, Fortisphere will continue to pioneer solutions that provide support for multi-vendor virtual infrastructures.

A May 15, 2008 Gartner report "Preparing for Heterogeneous Virtualization: The Third and Most Challenging Phase" by George J. Weiss and John Enck states that "the future of virtualization will trend toward pervasiveness across IT data centers. Most large data centers deploy a variety of vendor-specific architectures, such as mainframes, Unix systems, x86/x64 platforms and vendor-specific legacy systems. Various form factors include blades, racks, frames and towers. Unless logical transparency can be delivered, virtualization will be destined to be deployed in silos specific to vendor platforms and management solutions. Maximizing the benefits of virtualization across heterogeneous systems will help optimize resource use, availability, agility and granularity."

"We are committed to helping our customers more efficiently manage their virtual infrastructures, regardless of the underlying virtualization technology," said Mike Harper, president and CEO, Fortisphere. "With early, pent-up demand, Microsoft clearly has innovative solutions like Hyper-V that will allow them to be a market leader. Fortisphere is excited to be one of the first vendors to support new customers deploying both Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V."

"By delivering economical and accessible virtualization technologies for desktop to datacenter environments, Microsoft is helping customers receive the benefits our Dynamic IT strategy has to offer by enabling them to achieve a more agile IT infrastructure," said David Greschler, director, integrated virtualization at Microsoft. "Fortisphere's support of Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V through their policy-based virtualization management solution complements Hyper-V by providing the automation, visibility and control required to help effectively manage heterogeneous virtual environments."