HP has announced a number of new products, services and solutions designed to help firms understand how best to use their virtualised environments.

The firm used the VMworld 2008 show in Las Vegas to make the announcements, boasting support for long-running partner VMware in a number of areas.

HP hopes to impress users with the release of management software, virtualised services, virtual desktop infrastructure and storage infrastructure tools.

"Customers look to HP to implement virtualisation projects and strategies that lower operational costs and reduce pressure on data centre real estate," said Mark Linesch, vice president of infrastructure software at HP.

"As a leading VMware partner, HP is advancing the state of virtualisation to help our joint customers drive continued growth, manage operations and reduce enterprise-wide risk."

Brian Byun, vice president of global partners and solutions at VMware, added: "We are pleased to see the addition of HP products and services optimised for VMware virtualisation."

The announcements include HP Data Protector Zero Downtime Backup and Instant Recovery, which HP said would centralise and automate backup and instant recovery, and improve the availability of applications.

HP Insight Dynamics VSE, meanwhile, lets firms visualise their virtual storage and better manage their resources.

New integration services should help firms lower the cost of desktop lifecycle management, according to HP. Thin client and Microsoft Exchange support have also been improved.

HP and VMware have worked together to provide an integrated, simple and automated disaster recovery solution for virtual environments.

Additionally, HP said that its new HP ProLiant BL680c with Intel Xeon E7450 six-core processors scored highest for overall performance on VMware benchmarks.