The VMworld conference starting today in San Francisco will see a scrum-down between the major players in virtualisation.

VMware will show off ESX Server 3i, a slimmed-down hypervisor that is integrated with Flash memory and will allow virtualisation to be deployed in “a matter of minutes”, the firm claimed.

“It’s our approach to on-demand and the main advantage is that it’s a turnkey solution,” said Martin Niemer, VMware senior product manager. “You turn on the server and it boots into the hypervisor. You only need to key in a username and a password, and even that can be scripted.”

Niemer said there will be multiple firms that offer servers with the capability from this year, including IBM, HP and Dell. IBM has already announced details of its virtualisation-ready server, the x3950 M2, which embeds the virtualisation capability on a 4GB USB internal Flash storage device.

Also on show will be Virtual Desktop Manager 2 for brokering connections so that users can run applications as if they were local. The release, due later this year, is based on recent acquisition Propero’s WorkSpace product.

“This is VMware taking the virtual desktop seriously,” said Tommy Armstrong, enterprise desktop marketing manager. “You get all the control, security, centralisation and provisioning with a familiar user interface. We’ve abstracted the logic from the user and they don’t have to be IT-literate to use the product.”

The release will set up yet more competition with Citrix Systems which b illed virtualised desktops as a key reason for its recent decision to buy XenSource.

VMware’s third big announcement at VMworld will be Site Recovery Manager for automating planning and recovery from datacentre outages.

“It’s a workflow product that lets you have complete failover for a site where you want certain virtual machines to be reactivated in a certain order of priority,” said Niemer. “It’s a ‘red button’ product. In case of an outage, you hit the red button.”

Another virtualisation vendor shaping up to offer a lower-cost alternative to VMware is Virtual Iron which will today release version 4 of its enterprise platform that is built on the Xen open-source hypervisor and promises simpler tools for building, provisioning and managing virtual machines across many physical servers. It also integrates with Suse Linux Enterprise Server.

SWsoft will release a beta-test version of Virtuozzo 4.0, its software for running multiple instances of the same operating system. The upgrade, scheduled for commercial availability later this year, offers a revamped user interface with templates and samples to accelerate deployment, and support for real-time backups.