The basic virtualization capabilities are becoming commoditized, with all the vendors now offering their hypervisors for free, and VMware is trying to stay ahead with more sophisticated management capabilities.

It still has more to do, however. The company plans a further upgrade that will let companies transfer workloads between their own data centers and those of cloud service providers such as Terremark and Savvis. VMware still isn't saying when that product will be released.

vSphere starts at $166 per processor for the small business system and goes up to $3,495 for the Enterprise Plus version.