VMWare’s annual “VMWorld” conference is in full swing and on Tuesday the company announced vCloud Director, vShield Edge and four other new products. The products are an important development for virtualization despite sounding a little vSilly to non-IT professionals. In case you don’t know your vSphere from a hole in the ground, here’s a quick summary of where VMware is today: the company has spent a decade evangelizing the value of virtualizing hardware resources to make them do more with less. The “cloud” proselytization efforts have been successful: People started deploying more virtual machines than physical ones starting last year, according to IDC, and VMware now claims 190,000 customers worldwide. VMware’s flagship product is called vSphere and it can be thought of, more or less, like a Windows for the data center. On PCs operating systems like Windows play two roles: they offer an interface for the user to run applications and manage all the hardware (video cards, USB connections, etc.) via “device drivers” that speak their language.

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