VMware's VMworld conference is no longer just about EMC's virtualization business, but rather is about a broader move to virtualization across the industry.

At last week's event in Los Angeles, VMware announced new products, but other companies, such as Microsoft and XenSource, also made their presence felt by hosting booths or making announcements. About 6,000 people attended and roughly 90 companies exhibited, up from about 50 last year.

"This is certainly not a Virtualization 101 conference anymore," says Raghu Raghuram, vice president of platform products at VMware. "This is about, 'Hey, virtualization is a mainstay of your business. How are you going to do disaster recovery, business continuity, desktop virtualization?'"

News announcements illustrated the move beyond simple slicing and dicing of x86 hardware for server consolidation:

* VMware unveiled Lab Manager, the first product built on technology VMware acquired from Akimbi. Lab Manager integrates with VMware Virtual Infrastructure to extend its virtualization capabilities into software development.

Lab Manager pools virtual resources and enables software developers to configure test and development environments as needed.

Lab Manager will compete with products from such companies as Surgient and VMLogix.

* VMLogix, in Bangalore, India, made its U.S. debut at VMworld, unveiling VMLogix LabManager, which like VMware's Lab Manager, provides a virtualized environment for software test and development.

VMLogix received $3.5 million in a Series A round of funding from Bain Capital Ventures last month. Ravi Gururaj, CEO and founder of VMLogix, says a big difference between VMware's product and VMLogix LabManager is that VMLogix will support all of the virtualization platforms, VMware, Microsoft and Xen.

* VizionCore aired updates to its esxRanger, for backing up VMware virtual machines, and esxCharter, for monitoring virtual-machine performance, as well as diagnosing and resolving problems. EsxRanger 3.0 works with VMware's Consolidated Backup, which offloads virtual-machine backup processes from the host server onto a central server.

By integrating with VMware's Consolidated Backup, esxRanger will provide faster image-level backup - meaning it backs up the entire configured virtual machine, including registries, while eliminating overhead on the host server, says Azeem Mohamed, senior director of products and marketing. VizionCore's esxCharter 2.0, meanwhile, adds a bill-back capability that will enable customers to use the statistics the software collects for monitoring virtual-machine performance to calculate the use of various virtual machines. EsxRanger is priced at about $500 per CPU, and esxCharter starts at around $300 per CPU.