At the heart of VMware's claim are new performance capabilities in vSphere. The software can now manage a cluster of computers with up to 32 physical servers, 2,048 processor cores and 32TB of RAM, according to VMware. Perhaps more importantly for database applications, VMware says it has doubled the maximum I/O operations its software can perform, to more than 200,000 per second.

In a jab at the big systems vendors, VMware assembled a group of servers by the stage, including a Sun Sparc machine, to show how much capacity can now run in a vSphere cluster. A handwritten sign on the Sun machine had the word IBM crossed out and replaced with Oracle, which just beat IBM in a deal to acquire Sun.