Opsware Unifies Management of Virtual and Physical Systems.

New Opsware Virtualization Director Provides Complete Lifecycle Management of Virtual Server Environments

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Opsware Inc. (NASDAQ:OPSW), the leading provider of Data Center Automation software, today announced the introduction of Opsware Virtualization Director, the industry's first integrated solution that seamlessly manages the complete lifecycle of both physical and virtual servers to enable management on an enterprise scale.

Conventional virtualization management products are best suited to smaller deployments and are focused on basic virtual server provisioning. In contrast, Opsware Virtualization Director manages the entire virtual server lifecycle from provisioning and patching to compliance and configuration -- all the capabilities necessary to manage large numbers of heterogeneous virtual systems deployed in multiple data centers and the business-critical applications they support. The system provides automated capabilities for creating, securing and controlling virtual servers; for discovering, visualizing and tracking dependencies between virtual and physical infrastructure elements and the applications they host; and for standardizing management across both physical and virtual servers running on heterogeneous platforms throughout the enterprise.

"The concern for IT organizations about virtualization isn't deploying the technology, it's the uncertainty of managing exponentially more complexity on thousands of servers," said Stephen Elliot, Director of IDC's enterprise management research. "IT organizations deploying virtualization into production are looking for management solutions that bridge the gap between physical and virtual environments to reduce management complexity and support the delivery of IT services."

The Virtualization Myth

Despite the skyrocketing adoption of virtualization, analysts estimate that nearly 80 percent of all deployments have been limited to test and development scenarios on fewer than 500 servers. For customers attempting larger deployments, the lack of enterprise-class management tools has hindered success by increasing management costs and decreasing responsiveness and quality, threatening the ROI of the virtualization itself.

"Customers are just now beginning to understand that virtual servers require the same or greater management discipline as their physical server counterparts," said Vince Conroy, CTO at FusionStorm. "Given this newfound awareness, we see strong end user demand for a management solution that is consistent across physical and virtual machines. Opsware Virtualization Director is a catalyst for large-scale virtualization deployments, as it allows you to seamlessly manage an environment with both types of servers."

The ease of virtual server creation is leading to an explosion of new virtual machines that must be managed. Virtualization also represents a phenomenon in IT that hasn't been seen in over a decade -- adding yet another new operating system (the hypervisor) into an increasingly complex and diverse data center. Left unmanaged, virtualization can lead to unwieldy complexity, IT labor shortages, and potential security and service delivery problems on a global scale. To prevent these problems and enable IT organizations to realize the full benefits of virtualization, Opsware Virtualization Director uses automation technology to minimize the complexity created by the rapid adoption of server virtualization.

An Industry First: Virtual Server Lifecycle Management

Opsware Virtualization Director provides comprehensive virtual server lifecycle management to accelerate enterprise deployments by seamlessly managing across physical servers and environments virtualized with technologies such as VMware, Microsoft Virtual Server, Sun Solaris 10, XenSource and others. Initially, Opsware Virtualization Director will support VMware and Solaris 10; support for other environments is expected to be added in the future. Opsware Virtualization Director's integrated capabilities include:

* Creation - provision, activate and delete virtual servers on a large scale basis

* Control - start, stop, suspend and resume virtual servers as required

* Visualization - discover and view dependencies between applications, servers, network devices and storage

* Tracking - track relationships between virtual machines and their hosts and the applications they support; perform change impact assessments between applications, servers, network devices and storage

* Standardized management - seamless management across virtual and physical servers and networks encompassing the entire lifecycle, including patching, configuration, software deployment, audit and compliance, reporting, and best practices and policy-enforcement for the entire environment.

"Going from a small, confined deployment to a large scale virtualization rollout is a leap of faith for customers who still need to enforce critical compliance, security and reporting policies," said Tim Howes, CTO of Opsware Inc. "Opsware Virtualization Director offers a powerful new way to create and maintain a large number of virtual servers completely integrated with the way customers manage physical servers, easing management headaches and giving customers the confidence to take their virtualization deployments to a much wider scale."

Availability

The Opsware Virtualization Director will be generally available as part of Opsware System 6 in the first quarter of calendar 2007.

About Opsware Inc. (NASDAQ:OPSW)

Opsware Inc. is the world's leading Data Center Automation software company. The growth of the Internet is driving a shift from client/server computing to Web architecture. With this shift comes an overwhelming proliferation of servers, networking devices and applications, creating massive complexity that makes automated IT operations a necessity. Opsware automates the complete IT lifecycle and enables IT to automatically discover, provision, patch, configure, secure, change, scale, audit, recover, consolidate, migrate, and reallocate servers, network devices and applications. Over 350 of the world's largest companies, outsourcers and government agencies use Opsware to deliver this new, automated model of IT. For more information on Opsware Inc., please visit our Web site at www.opsware.com.

Opsware is a service mark and trademark of Opsware Inc. All other product names, service marks, and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

This press release contains forward-looking statements regarding the benefits and capabilities of, and the market demand for, our software products. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements, including the risk that the assumptions underlying our current business strategy may change, that our experience operating as a software company is limited, and that the products may not perform as described. More information about these and other factors that could affect our business are included in our Form 10-K filed with the SEC on April 14, 2006 under the headings "Risk Factors" and "Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations" and the Forms 10-Q and 8-K that we file during the fiscal year. The determination of when the Opsware Virtualization Director described in this release, including the supported environments for Opsware Virtualization Director, will be made generally available, if ever, remains at the sole discretion of Opsware Inc.