A new release management and deployment framework known as BOSH was released Wednesday by VMware, one year after the roll-out of its Platform-as-a-Service Cloud Foundry. In an official blog post marking the event, the Cloud Foundry team said that BOSH should make it easier for end-users of the platform to manage production instances of their apps.

After criticism over new restrictions on the amount of virtual memory customers can deploy before having to buy new licenses, VMware has boosted the limits on virtual RAM so high that most customers should not be negatively affected.

While the newest version of VMware's vSphere virtualization suite represents a big step toward practical cloud computing, virtualization technology continues to spread based on the same basic benefits that made it popular in the first place, analysts say.

After eight months of hype VMware has finally delivered the update to its core virtualization platform, announcing Thursday that vSphere 4 is generally available worldwide.

Among the consequences of VMware's battery of vSphere 4 announcements Tuesday about its new virtualization infrastructure and add-on components, third-party software vendors specializing in fault-tolerance and high-availability are feeling new pressure now that VMware has added basic versions of those functions to its core product.

Grid vendor Platform Computing has unveiled new private cloud software that aggregates servers, storage, networking tools and hypervisors to create a shared pool of physical and virtual resources.

For all the hype about cloud computing in the enterprise—hype that Gartner believes is now nearing its peak—IT professionals continue to tell cloud-related vendors that the cloud will not be practical until several serious concerns are addressed. VMware, with its vSphere 4 announcement today, is laying the foundation for what it hopes will be a central role for VMware technology in enterprises making use of both public and private cloud computing systems.