HP announced innovative management and service solutions that extend the benefits of virtualization beyond servers to the entire infrastructure.

As a result, customers can maximize resource utilization, improve administrator productivity and drive business growth.

HP also announced the first virtual desktop infrastructure solution for under USD1,000 per user seat. The solution was demonstrated during VMware Chief Executive Officer Paul Maritz’s keynote presentation on Sept 2.

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 center. 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. 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.

“Chief information officers need solutions that increase the cost-saving benefits of virtualization while cutting through the complexity and administrative issues caused by virtual sprawl,” said Aman Dokania, vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Software, HP Asia Pacific and Japan. “For more than half a decade, HP and VMware have jointly invested in technologies that enable customers to maximize the value of their virtualization efforts. By extending virtualization beyond servers through HP’s converged infrastructure solutions, customers can fully realize the potential of their people, applications and technology infrastructure.”

Only HP can deliver a complete, end-to-end virtualization solution that combines hardware and software to:

Cost-effectively deliver a virtual desktop infrastructure that provides increased data protection and uptime. HP’s Virtual Desktop Reference Architecture for VMware View also lowers support costs versus traditional PC environments.

Lower costs up to 50 percent and improve capacity utilization up to 33 percent by virtualizing storage capacity with HP LeftHand P4000 and other StorageWorks virtualization solutions.

To help simplify data center management of a virtual and physical infrastructure, and maximize VMware investments, customers need common tools. HP, teamed with VMware, is delivering new capabilities that bridge the physical and virtual data center silos through unified management and automation.

Key customer benefits include:

Direct administrator access, through VMware vCenter, to the physical infrastructure to manage server health, power use and remote control for the first time with the new HP Insight Control for VMware vCenter.

Increased administrator effectiveness with HP Operations Manager for virtualization by monitoring the availability and performance of all virtual and physical assets through a single common dashboard.