Dell on Monday began revealing its plans for the enterprise virtualization market, disclosing an expanded partnership with VMware Inc.

Dell will use VMware software to enable single physical servers to act as two or more separate or "virtual" systems. The platform will be deployed on Dell two- and four-processor servers.

As rivals such as Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Sun Microsystems have increasingly aligned their business around adaptive- or virtual-computing strategies, Dell until now hadn't joined in the snowballing trend.

Pete Morowski, VP of software development for Dell's product group, said during a teleconference Monday that the company is "entering the virtualization market--as part of an answer in what we call our scalable enterprise portfolio."

The partnership with VMware will enable Dell to expand on its strategy of creating two- and four-processor server offerings that can scale up to meet performance demands of customers, as opposed to solutions by competitors that are geared to scaling up to higher performance with associated higher cost.

The move is also in line with Dell's longstanding tradition of partnering with third-party providers for its support services.

VMware VMotion technology will let users dynamically move applications to different physical servers based on business needs, such as peaks from end-of-the-month reporting or holiday Web traffic, Morowski says.

The Dell-VMware virtual infrastructure configurations, tested and supported by Dell, include its PowerEdge 6650 servers running VMware ESX Server 2.0.1, Virtual Center, and VMotion; the Dell/EMC CX300 and CX500 storage systems to enable VMotion capability; and a single PowerEdge 1750 running the VMware Virtual Center Management Server.

The configurations are available now; pricing starts at $30,579.