“There’s no way an average user will use all of a PC blade’s processing power, memory and other capabilities,” says Randy Printz, president and chief executive officer of ClearCube. “So we extended our virtual desktop bundle to span across multiple desktop seats.”

Each new v7100 blade holds up to eight cores, 64 gigabytes of memory, and six hard drive slots for SAS or SATA drives that can hold up to 1.5 terabytes. Each blade can run 50 to 80 virtual machines; the solution is certified to run VMware, Xen, and Microsoft’s HyperV virtual machines. “We’re making sure these blades are fully certified for any virtualization technology, so that customers can work with something with which they’re already familiar and as needs change they can migrate to different virtualization technologies,” says Mike Barron, director of product marketing for ClearCube.

A new 7U chassis, the V7000, holds 10 of these blades; each rack can hold 60-70 blades. The last piece of hardware is the i8440, a redesigned thin client I/Port device that has a 1.2 gigabyte processor and can support one or two monitors.

Sentral 6.0 software lets IT managers manage the desktops. In addition to added support for virtualization, Sentral now supports IPMI, an industry standard interface for managing different kinds of hardware. It provides reports on which users are logged into which blades, which applications are running on which virtual machines, and what the cpu and memory utilizations look like.

This hardware/software combination costs around $1,000 per seat, including chassis, blade PC, desktop client device, virtualization technology (e.g. ESX), virtual machine operating system (e.g. WinXP Pro), management software and one year of maintenance and service. (It doesn’t include extended maintenance and service, professional services, user application software, peripherals such as keyboard/mouse/monitor, network infrastructure or shared storage.)

One-to-many desktop virtualizations have been criticized in the past for being too slow and hard to troubleshoot. But perhaps with the more powerful hardware it’s rolling out today, ClearCube will be able to prove its version is ready for prime time. At $1,000 per seat, it had better.