"The VSPP incorporates a new licensing model that makes the VMware infrastructure suite available to hosting providers on a per-virtual machine, per month basis," says Grant Mufford, VMware product manager at Workgroup.

"With this new programme, hosting providers can easily develop their own customised virtual infrastructure as service offerings that 'rent' VMware virtual machine capacity to end customers."

Mufford says that, for end customers, virtual infrastructure as a service offers significant benefits compared to traditional hosting offerings that provide dedicated servers or shared hosting.

"Dedicated server offerings often lead to long-term capacity over-commitment and lack of flexibility, while the VSPP enables hosting providers to offer 'utility computing' services, which allow end customers to instantaneously add or reduce their hosted virtual infrastructure capacity to align with event-driven demand.

"With shared hosting, single operating system instances are partitioned, forcing customer into one-size-fits-all computing models that lack full isolation from one another. VMware hosting virtual machines are fully isolated - if one virtual machine crashes, others remain available - and they can be easily tailored to the particular needs of every application."

With the VSPP, hosting providers can enable end customers to benefit from hosted virtual infrastructure that is more highly available and robust than traditional hosted services, he adds.