Dell has expanded its virtualisation applications with the introduction of Dell Precision R5500, a virtualised 2U rack workstation which will allow four professional graphics users to work from a single workstation from anywhere concurrently.

The new 2U rack workstation is a four-GPU (graphics processing unit) configuration that is certified by Citrix with GPU pass-through on Citrix XenServer 6 using Citrix XenDesktop HDX 3D Pro.

Dell Precision R5500 is designed for customers running 3D workloads in the engineering, medical, media and entertainment, scientific, software development and economic and finance market segments looking to support additional users on a single workstation.

Users can now connect to Dell Precision R5500 via Dell and non-Dell computing devices including thin clients, laptops, desktops or other mobile devices that have a loaded Citrix Receiver.

Citrix XenServer with HDX 3D Pro enables the virtualised workstation environment with a dedicated discrete graphics card per user or virtual machine. The dedicated graphics provides the user with full access to the graphics card in a virtualised environment.

Users can now configure their Dell Precision R5500 with up to four NVIDIA Quadro 2000 mid-range graphics cards, with other high-end NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards to be available soon.

The new rack workstation offers bus slots with options of up to five full-height and full-length PCIe slots, and also offers graphics, GPU compute cards including the new NVIDIA Quadro and NVIDIA Tesla applications.

It offers high-performance Intel Xeon processors with memory capacity of up to 192GB¹and dual-wide GPU slots that scale up to 450 watts, up to six 2.5-inch SAS HDDs or five SATA HDDs.

NVIDIA Professional Solutions Group general manager Jeff Brown said the new rack workstation configuration from Dell provides designers and engineers with a virtualised desktop performance option.

"Dell’s R5500 powered by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs gives these users an opportunity to experience the full power of high-end OpenGL, Direct X and CUDA applications in a small form-factor, virtualized desktop environment," said Brown.