IBM has announced details of its forthcoming Virtualization Engine (VE) software, bringing server virtualisation another step towards the corporate mainstream.

VE, which will feature on the iSeries i5 server due next month, lets a single server run many operating systems concurrently, and so lowers admin and running costs.

IBM has offered similar tools in the past, but this is the first time it has delivered a micro-partitioning feature that lets each CPU run up to 10 operating systems.

IBM said it will add VE to other servers in coming months, and will use third-party products for virtualisation on its x86 servers.

Martin Hingley of research firm IDC said VE does not yet match the abilities of IBM's zSeries mainframe virtualisation, and said better cross-platform support is needed. "The big challenge to IBM is that firms want these features to be [interoperable] across manufacturers," he added.

Server virtualisation capabilities are fast becoming a common feature in enterprise IT systems. Specialist virtualisation vendor VMware, recently acquired by storage giant EMC, dominates this technology in the x86 server market, and supports a wide range of virtualised operating systems.

Microsoft recently issued a beta version of its Virtual Server add-on for Windows, and is expected to ship a full version later this year. Though Sun does not market micro-partitioning virtualisation tools, the firm pioneered hardware partitioning, and provides similar capabilities for workload management in its high-end systems.