Fico also uses vShield Zones, a new technology in vSphere, to enforce security and compliance policies across a group of virtual machines. The technology allows it to move those virtual machines to a different cluster pool and carry the security policies with them.

VSphere 4 also adds fault tolerance capabilities; thin storage provisioning, which allows less physical storage to be allocated to a virtual machine; storage vMotion, for switching an application between storage systems while it is still running; and a "distributed switch" developed with Cisco.

Big companies aren't VMware's only target. VSphere includes a new edition, vSphere Essentials, that starts at US$995 for three servers. Small companies can virtualize a pool of three or four servers, so that a workload can fail over to a different system in the event of a hardware failure, Maritz said. The high-end edition of vSphere, Enterprise Plus, starts at $3,495 per CPU.