VMware’s best friend Cisco is going into the desktop virtualization business with Citrix claiming they’re going to be “game changing.”

The companies say they’re throwing into together because of joint customer demand.

They also want to ride the adoption hockey stick that Gartner’s projections are promising. The researcher estimates that 60% of corporate desktops will be virtualized by 2012.

The pre-packaged, reportedly massively scalable and simple solutions the pair have come up with are based on Cisco servers and networking and Citrix’ XenDesktop software with coordinated support thrown in.

They call it Cisco Desktop Virtualization with Citrix XenDesktop.

They start with a blade starter kit for 300 users that can grow in increments of 400 users with expansion packs.

The system calls for 40 of Cisco’s Unified Compute System (UCS) chassis housing 320 two-socket blades, one switch and Cisco’s fabric interconnect. The blades can have either standard memory for application virtualization or Cisco’s fancier extended-memory blades.

The companies haven’t disclosed pricing but the widgetry is supposed to establish a low in infrastructure promising 20% lower cost for compute and networking because of integration and 60% greater virtual desktop density per blade.

They propose to be hypervisor-agnostic and support both Xen and VMware immediately and Microsoft’s Hyper-V soon.

The solution provides for storage access but doesn’t decree or integrate a particular brand although NetApp is the only storage validated so far, a little oddity given Cisco’s strategic relationship with EMC.