VMware wants to be seen as less of a pure infrastructure provider and more as a company that helps businesses deliver applications more reliably to end users, Wolf said. VDC OS "gives them a message they can use to combat Microsoft, because Microsoft has been building a strong story around the end user and the application and how that relates to the virtual infrastructure."

The products for improving application performance will include VMware Fault Tolerance, for ensuring transactions continue in the event of a server failure, and VMware Data Recovery, a basic backup and recovery tool. To help applications scale better the company will provide the ability to add new CPUs and memory to a virtual machine without having to restart it, and it will increase the amount of CPUs and memory a virtual machine can access to eight CPUs and 256G bytes of RAM, from 4 CPUs and 64G bytes today, Balkansky said.

Also planned is vApp, a development tool that will let ISVs (independent software vendors) and large enterprises create applications that are prepackaged with multiple virtual machines, along with their policy and configuration requirements. VApp will be based on the Open Virtual Machine Format, a specification that Citrix is also supporting, which is supposed to let the applications be deployed on any OVF-compliant hypervisor.

Finally, VMware will update its strategy around desktop virtualization and introduce a new brand, vClient. The company is developing a new "client virtualization layer" for laptop and desktop PCs, and eventually also for smartphones. Customers will be able to run guest operating systems on this virtualization layer without needing a host OS underneath, potentially reducing OS license costs.

VMworld starts Monday evening at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, and runs until Thursday. The company expects 14,000 people to attend, up from 11,000 last year.

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