HP unveils virtual desktop solutions

At the open of VMworld, HP revealed new product, management and service solutions designed to bring virtualisation to the desktop by hosting as many as 800 virtual desktops on its c7000 BladeSystems blade server, states InternetNews.

The HP Virtual Desktop Reference Architecture for VMware allows all of the compute and management work to be done on the server and provides adequate bandwidth for both networking and storage to make a traffic-intense task like server-based desktops possible.

Unlike IBM's announcement, the HP plan does require customers to host the server hardware for the virtual desktops within their own data centre. With applications running on the server, data must constantly flow between the client and the server. That's particularly hard when it comes to storage.

The latest version of Microsoft's Hyper-V standalone hypervisor, which includes new functionality for the live migration of servers, is now available for download, reports ZDNet.

Microsoft announced the free download on Friday in a blog posting from Microsoft's Windows Virtualisation team. The release came on the eve of VMworld in San Francisco, which is organised by virtualisation software company VMware.

Apart from its live migration capabilities, Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 features expanded processor and memory support for companies looking to consolidate their servers, Microsoft said. It now supports up to eight physical processors, rather than four, and up to 64 logical processors, up from 16. The software now also provides support for up to 1TB of physical memory.

Global computer server sales in the second quarter continued to plunge to levels not seen in years, research firm IDC said, but signs of stability are appearing in a segment that analysts call a bellwether for the IT industry, according to Reuters.

Factory revenue in the worldwide server market tumbled 30.1% to $9.8 billion in the April to June period, the lowest revenue since IDC began tracking the market on a quarterly basis in 1996.

Server unit shipments fell 30.4%, the largest ever year-over-year quarterly decline, IDC said.

"We're kind of calling this the bottom, that Q1 to Q2 is the bottom. We thought it would be like a V-shape but I think it's more like a U-shape bottom," said IDC analyst Jed Scaramella.