Through its partner program, IBM unveils a virtual desktop offering for small businesses

One of the hottest virtualization markets to date is turning into a vendor free-for-all as a mixture of established and startup companies rush to stake their claims.

Ever since VMware coined the term, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) has conjured images of large data centers, beefy servers, centralized storage, and complex software stacks. It's a given that each VDI installation requires numerous servers, software packages, and storage systems in order to provide desktop virtualization for more than a small handful of users, so VDI just has to be both expensive and complicated to deploy. Right?

New platforms such as tablets and smartphones, loads of new virtualization technologies, and the need to access the desktop from any device, anywhere, forever change personal computing.

Open source virtualization program VirtualBox has reached version 4, and the developers are hailing it as a major milestone. VirtualBox is one of the many projects Oracle found itself with when it purchased Sun earlier this year, and this is the first major release by the company.

The newly revamped Sun Ray 3 and 3i thin client systems announced by Oracle carry on the Sun strategy of making easy-to-deploy hardware that supports a variety of end-user virtual workloads while maintaining central, secure control over desktop systems. ...

A new survey has revealed that agility has replaced cost as a major factor in desktop virtualisation projects

There is so much competition for what computer companies perceive as a tremendous growth opportunity in desktop virtualization that the leading virtual desktop vendors have taken to re-announcing packages and products to highlight small improvements and garner some attention.

Cisco today unveiled two virtual desktop devices, more efficient virtualization software and more affordable videoconferencing endpoints, building on its line of video collaboration tools and capabilities for companies.