At VMworld 2009 HP announced innovative management and service solutions that extend the benefits of virtualisation beyond servers to the entire infrastructure.

HP also announced the first virtual desktop infrastructure solution for under $1,000 per user seat. The solution was demonstrated during VMware chief executive officer Paul Maritz’s keynote presentation today.

Virtual desktop infrastructure is a server-based computing model that gives users a PC desktop experience, while securing all applications, management and processing in the data centre. The HP Virtual Desktop Reference Architecture for VMware View specifically addresses the performance bottlenecks and management complexities of other offerings. Customers can test the solution in select HP solution centers worldwide.

Industry analyst firm IDC predicts that companies will spend nearly $100 billion by 2012 on the management and administration of virtual servers and expects that new virtual server installations will outnumber physical server shipments, starting as early as the end of this year.(2) HP is the first provider to address these challenges by delivering a converged infrastructure that brings together all data center resources, including server, storage, network, I/O, application and desktop.

“By extending virtualisation beyond servers through HP’s converged infrastructure solutions, customers can fully realise the potential of their people, applications and technology infrastructure,” said Mark Potter, senior vice-president and general manager, Infrastructure Software and Blades, HP.