Dell on Wednesday introduced two blade servers designed for hosting virtual machines and said it would offer Microsoft's Hyper-V software as a factory-installed option on PowerEdge servers.

The PowerEdge M905 and M805 are four-socket and two-socket blades, respectively. The M905 is capable of supporting 66 virtual machines, according to Dell. Both are available with a choice of Citrix XenServer, VMware, and Microsoft's Hyper-V.

The new blades are available as of Wednesday. Prices start at $4,999 for the M905 and $1,699 for the M805.

Dell introduced the two servers about a week after rival Hewlett-Packard launched the ProLiant BL495c G5, which was the first blade designed to be a virtual machine-intensive host in a data center rack. HP says its blade will host up to 32 virtual machines, based on each VM needing a minimum of 4 GB of memory. The BL495c uses two quad-core Opteron 2300 processors from Advanced Micro Devices and has a starting price of $2,449.

The Dell M905 has a maximum of 192 GB of memory and uses dual- or quad-core AMD Opteron 8000 series processors. The M805 supports up to 128 GB of memory and is available with either dual- or quad-core AMD Opteron 2000 series processors.

Dell also started offering Microsoft's Windows Server 2008 with Hyper-V as a factory-installed option on Dell PowerEdge servers. PowerEdge servers also are available with Microsoft's System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 software.

In addition to the new blades, Dell launched 10-Gb Ethernet and 8-Gb Fibre Channel switches and mezzanine cards to provide customers with more bandwidth in their data centers. The computer maker also introduced the EqualLogic PS5500E storage array for virtual server environments. The PS5500E packs 24 or 48 TB in a 4U rack space. Pricing starts at $78,000.

On the services side, Dell launched consulting services for Microsoft Hyper-V deployments. The services include assessment, design, and implementation. Prices start at $15,700.

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