It’s day 1 of the VMworld 2011 conference, and we are already seeing a host of vendors and existing partners further aligning themselves with EMC’s virtualization subsidiary.

Virsto, a startup that developed software designed to reduce VM storage costs, announced the upcoming beta version of its offering for vSphere 4.1. Virsto has been offering a Hyper-V version for more than a year, and now its product has been designed for vSphere – VDI deployments in particular – just in time for the conference.  What makes Virsto an interesting company to watch is that its software can reduce storage per virtual desktop by 50 percent in typical circumstances.

“The idea is to provide instant cloning of desktop images with greater virtual desktop density and higher performance storage I/O. VDI creates all sorts of storage bloat storing all those desktop images, and they have applied their technology to make a better thin provisioning mousetrap.”

F5 had an update as well.  As a part of a team-up with VMware and parent company EMC, it launched version 3 of its BIG-IP vMotion software.  The offering simplifies  the process of moving VMs from one remote datacenter to another according to the company, and comes with an iApp template that includes documentation and performance best practices.

In turn, Emulex announced a few upgrades to its some of its products, two of which include extended support for VMweare tech.  Its  Emulex OneConnect OCe11102 10Gb Ethernet adapters now come with eight unique PCI functions to VMware ESXi, and version 1.1 of OneCommand Manager for VMware vCenter Server is now out.  The adapter management application now also supports the hypervisor, and is offered with a lifecycle management plug-in for all of Emulex’s adapters.