Also planned for next year is vStorage, with "thin provisioning" for allocating storage to virtual machines more efficiently. When IT staff set up virtual machines today they assign to them a certain volume of storage, even though all that storage isn't used right away. Thin provisioning lets the administrator assign a smaller volume of physical storage and then sends an alert when more needs to be added.

The alerts will appear in vCenter, an updated version of VMware's Virtual Center management suite also planned for 2009. VMware will release an API (application programming interface) that storage vendors can use to give visibility into vStorage from their own management tools, Balkansky said. VCenter will also gain new modules including CapacityIQ, ConfigControl and Orchestrator.

Chris Wolf, a senior analyst with Burton Group, said vNetwork could heal a divide between server and network administrators. Virtualization has "built a wall between server admins and network admins," he said. "The network guys were never really comfortable with the virtualization guys having this hidden, virtual network that they didn't have visibility into. This changes that and lets the network guys manage a virtual network like any other."

VMware is opening its architecture more to other vendors, Wolf said. "One of the things that has been going well for Citrix with their XenServer product is that its architecture is probably the most open in the industry. I think this is a good start for VMware, though further opening their storage architecture would help as well," he said.

VCloud is a set of technologies that let hosting providers like BT and T Mobile turn their data centers into cloud environments, Balkansky said. It will also allow customers to connect their data centers to those clouds, so they can move virtual environments off their own premises if they want them hosted by a third party.

"We'll build a set of APIs that will allow customers to extend a virtual machine from their on-premise infrastructure out into the cloud. It's like Vmotion for moving a virtual machine from an internal to an external data center and back again, while still having those policies for availability and security attached." Vmotion is VMware's existing technology for moving running virtual machines from one physical server to another.

Use of vCloud will start with "baby steps," Balkansky acknowledged. "We see interest from large companies that want to be able to rent some of their overflow capacity to others, it will probably start there, and it will start with the kind of noncritical workloads you would be comfortable delegating to a third party."