The idea behind the package is to allow organizations to set up an infrastructure that will allow them to make use of hosted cloud services, said Paul Maritz, VMware CEO, in a webcast announcing the releases.

"Allowing [organizations] to aggregate their resources into larger pools, operate them more efficiently and to tie them to externally provisioned infrastructure is the fundamental starting point for this transformation" to cloud computing, he said.

The package includes new versions of VMware's flagship vSphere virtual machine manager, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, the vShield security framework, the vCloud Director management console and a new product, vSphere Storage Appliance. The package also includes vCenter Operations, which was released earlier this year.

Overall, the new set of products features more than 200 changes from former releases, according to the company.

VSphere 5 features the ability to run extremely large virtual machines, one capable of utilizing 32 processors and one terabyte of memory. It can also execute what VMware calls "policy-based" automation, which can make advanced decisions on where to deploy a virtual machine.