The past week in the cloud featured updates encompassing several of the hottest trends cooking in IT right now, and recent developments in open-source cloud kicks off our recap. OpenStack, the Rackspace cloud OS platform that managed to gain itself over 50 partners to date, welcomed the latest member who joined the initiative.  Web host DreamHost extended support to the platform via Ceph integration.

Rackspace’s OpenStack is one of the main elements currently contributing to open cloud innovation, though it’s certainly not the only one.

Many other companies are venturing into this space from more than one angle, and among them is VMware. The virtualization giant hopes to realize its first serious open-source cloud project in the form of the Cloud Foundry, where efficiency will be a key focus. Speaking at the GigaOm Structure conference, VMware President and CEO Paul Martiz said that his company’s and customers’ admin per physical machines ratio should drop to one per 1,000 or so servers. That’s the ratio Google has managed to accomplish; a lot less than VMware’s one admin per 20 to 50 servers.

Another area VMware is looking at is desktop virtualization. Last week, it launched the Ready Desktop Solutions program to extend the scope of some of its offerings using the VMware View client.

Lastly, the third most highlighted trend this past week seems to have been cloud management.  To this end, Oracle acquired web-based cloud management company FatWire. The latter used to develop content management solutions, and recently launched a solution designed to be deployed on-site or in a public or hybrids cloud. ScaleXtreme also had a big update in this area. The company launched its cloud-based systems management service. This new offering supporting Amazon EC2 and VMware cloud provides an end-to-end system  to manage a user’s virtual machines deployment.