Qumranet, the commercial sponsor of the KVM virtualisation software, has begun beta-testing a desktop virtualisation system aimed at geographically distributed organisations.

Virtualisation-enabled and hardware-assisted 8Gigabit Fibre Channel SAN adapters allow applications to run under Microsoft's Hyper-V at "near-native transaction performance", SAN specialist QLogic has claimed.

Parallels and Quest Software have teamed up to offer an end-to-end Windows desktop virtualisation system based on Parallels' operating system-level virtualisation technology, Virtuozzo Containers.

Endeavors Technologies has taken a step toward commoditising the emerging technology of application streaming with a free, fully functional version of its Application Jukebox product.

10Gig Ethernet specialist Force10 Networks has claimed that its switch/routers are now integral to more than a dozen of the world's top 40 supercomputers. They include the US Los Alamos National Laboratory's Roadrunner, which currently ranks as the world's most powerful supercomputer and was the first to reach a peak performance of 1 Petaflop.

The Ruby programming language, which has become popular as the basis for web 2.0 sites such as Twitter, contains serious security flaws that could allow attackers to take over an organisation's web server, according to the Ruby development team.

Tresys Technology has released a desktop virtualisation platform with a difference - it is designed from the ground up for organisations needing tight security, including military bodies.

Senior EC officials have denied a media report that suggested the European Commission was falling short in its own internal attempt to promote open standards in the technology sector.

The virtualised “desktop 2.0” is about to kill once and for all the idea that a PC needs to be a physical device, Citrix CEO Mark Templeton has predicted at the company’s well-attended iForum event in Edinburgh.

Virtual Bridges this week launched version 5 of its Win4Lin Desktop desktop virtualisation system, with performance increases that it claims beat the likes of VMware Workstation and other competitors in the growing desktop virtualisation market.

The K Desktop Environment (KDE) Project has made available a beta of KDE 4.1, the new version of its widely used open source desktop environment.

It's a small step for an operating system, perhaps, but it could be another giant leap for Linux. DeviceVM has announced that its Splashtop 'instant-on' Linux is to appear on Asus laptops from this summer.

Double-Take Software, the US company better known for its replication software, has announced the availability of its Virtual Recovery Assistant to avoid computer downtime when migrating from physical to virtual servers.

Desktop virtualisation has a new kid on the block after US-based startup MokaFive commercially launched its MokaFive Virtual Desktop Solution on Tuesday.

It's not exactly how devotees foresaw Linux reaching mass-market desktop PCs, but it could be a turning point nonetheless. Taiwanese giant Asus is to embed DeviceVM's Splashtop Linux on millions of mainstream motherboards.

Dell has picked quad-core Opteron processors from AMD to power two new rack-mount servers, called R805 and R905. It said the servers will be offered with embedded versions of VMware ESXi and Citrix XenServer, plus eventually Microsoft's HyperV as well.

Qumranet, the start-up behind the increasingly popular KVM kernel-level virtualisation technology, has thrown its hat into the desktop virtualisation ring with a system it promises can deliver an experience indistinguishable from a conventional desktop.

10G Ethernet provides big performance gains for virtualised systems, as long as the network adapter can offload the "heavy lifting" from the host server, said Chelsio Communications as it announced that the latest release 4.1 of Citrix XenServer now includes drivers for its Unified Wire 10G NICs as standard.

Modern PCs use only a small fraction of their processing power and waste energy. According to NComputing, there is an answer to the malady, a new desktop virtualisation product, with a much lower per seat cost compared with competitor products from VMware, Citrix, Microsoft and Wyse.

VMware is talking up the green benefits of its virtualisation technology after recording a strong performance in the first quarter.

Nearly half of IT professionals admit that they had run out of space, power or cooling capacity at their datacentres, according to a recent survey.

A US and Israel-based company, InstallFree, has launched the first of a series of virtualisation products designed to give IT managers an easier and more secure way to manage and deploy virtual applications.

Yankee Group has been forced to retract a report on virtualisation after several inaccuracies were reported. The research company has already withdrawn the report from its website.

VMware has this week officially made available its Lifecycle Manager tool which allows IT managers to better control the lifecycle of virtual machines (VMs), right from their creation, through to their decommissioning.

Software company ScaleMP is claiming to have turned virtualisation on its head - instead of making one server look like several, it said that it can make a cluster of entry-level servers look like a single high-end machine.

Marathon has launched everRun VM, claiming it to be the world's first fault-tolerant software for server virtualisation.

Current data centre numbers and infrastructures are unsustainable said HP, as it rolled out a range of services, hardware and software at its Technology@work conference in Barcelona.

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Half of all British computer users fail to recycle old PCs or dispose of them responsibly. The scale of the problem has been revealed by research from Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC).

French hardware provider Bull has launched an all-in-one virtualisation server for companies looking for less complexity and the ability to reduce the number of deployed servers.

Computacenter has agreed a formal tie-up with Xsigo Systems, a technology leader in I/O virtualisation.

HP has opted to take the mid-market array battle to EMC with its latest EVA 4400, just weeks after saying it planned to face-off with its rival in the low-end storage market.

VMware has announced a new security technology that it claimed can protect applications running in virtual machines in ways previously not possible in physical environments.

VMware plans to produce software that makes desktop virtualisation easier to deploy, the company announced at the VMworld Europe show this week.

EMC is looking to tread on IBM's toes after extending its virtual tape library (VTL) to cater for Big Blue's mainframe community.

Server virtualisation is increasingly being used not merely to consolidate servers, but to make backups easier, management software company Vizioncore has claimed.

Microsoft, for so long the bad boy of the computer industry, has surprised many with the announcement that it is to make far-reaching changes to its technology and increase the openness of its products.

Fujitsu Siemens Computers (FSC) is offering to provide a VMWare Infrastructure 3 solution for a free 45-day trial period to allow organisations to conduct detailed proof-of-concept and sizing analyses. FSC is also offering a special trade-in deal on its Primergy servers.

Aperture Technologies has mobilised its Vista datacentre planning and management software. It has taken a Motorola MC50 rugged PDA and added software to help admins inventory their IT gear and track datacentre resources such as electrical power.

A Russian schoolteacher, convicted last year of installing unlicensed copies of Microsoft Windows and Office on school computers, has founded a lobby group to try and persuade the Russian authorities to stop using western “proprietary” software.