VMware made the new version of its virtualization platform available yesterday, as the virtualization powerhouse muscles into cloud computing. vSphere 4, which VMware is pitching as the "first cloud operating system," was officially announced last month, but the company has been making noise about the product (a replacement for VM Infrastructure) since last year.

Prices run from $166 to $3,495 per processor for vSphere, which VMware says transforms a data center into an "internal private cloud." And the company is offering a free, 60-day download.

Not surprisingly, VMware lined up a slew of endorsements for the release. Two examples:

Christopher Rence, CIO of FICO: "VMware vSphere 4 is the core of our cloud computing initiative because it gives us the cost savings and scalability benefits of cloud computing, with the choice to deploy any application or OS without getting locked into any particular architecture."

Daniel Liyew, director of data center service line at Alstom: "Efficiency gains improve even more with VMware vSphere 4 thanks to features like VMware Host Profiles and VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch. These features will allow us to deploy new hosts more quickly, achieve standardization, and more efficiently manage our virtualized environment to reduce our operational overhead."

But you don't have to look hard to find kind things being said about the upgraded platform's potential. InfoWorld:

In short, if you're running a VMware infrastructure, life should get easier. For anyone who's ever tried to provide rock-solid OS-based clustering services, the new VM clustering feature, called Fault Tolerance, should be a vast improvement. Hot Add of CPUs and RAM has never really been an option for most shops, but it suddenly is (with the right OS, of course). These moves show that VMware is still pushing the virtualization envelope.