Systems giant HP and application delivery vendor Citrix have teamed up to provide virtualisation on 64-bit HP ProLiant servers.

Citrix XenServer HP Select Edition is being touted as a way to simplifying and accelerate the deployment of servers.

Citrix said that the XenServer management console integrated “seamlessly” with the HP Insight Control management package customers already use to physically manage HP Servers. Both vendors said the speed of deployment would also reduce the time to achieve return on investment.

Server virtualisation is increasingly gaining acceptance as the de facto method of alleviating power and space concerns within the datacentre, said Dennis Szubert, analyst with Quocirca, as it allows organisations to consolidate their server estate and drive up utilisation rates of commodity servers.

Nevertheless, Quocirca's research suggests that the technology is still in its infancy: Szubert said the number of firms having virtualised systems in trial deployments may be quite high, but that the number of servers actually virtualised was around 10 per cent.

Citrix XenServer HP Select Edition will be available from HP on March 31.