Citrix took the spotlight today with their announcement of the Cloud.com acquisition, but VMware is shrugging it off, as they have their own major announcements, like the unveiling of a new software.

vSphere Storage Appliance is a new software product that will bring the rich business continuity and automated resource management capabilities of VMware vSphere to small and midsized businesses (SMBs) without the cost and complexity of shared storage.

“With the introduction of the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, we will continue to bring the business continuity and cost efficiency benefits of virtualization to companies of all sizes,” said Bogomil Balkansky, vice president, product marketing, VMware.

“Business continuity and disaster recovery top the list of priorities our SMB customers are tackling, and with this new offering we hope to empower SMBs with all the automation capabilities of VMware vSphere without the costs or complexity of shared storage. SMBs will also find that if they do invest in shared storage hardware down the road, they’ll be able to transition without any service disruption using VMware vSphere Storage vMotion.”

They also announced the release of the updated version of vSphere, the vSphere 5.  Wikibon and SiliconAngle will hold a real-time analysis of VMware’s new products to help cloud users with this.

Aside from these major revelations, VMware also announced the vRAM, which pertains to the amount of physical memory configured to a virtual machine.  There’s also a new security feature for their vShield, and a vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.  An update to their SRM, which is used for disaster recovery, among other functions, was also announced today.

So with all these announcements, is Citrix really outshining VMware?  While Citrix is still building up its infrastructure offerings, VMware is steadily updating its range of virtualization tools and services.  Today’s announcement was a highly anticipated one, affecting businesses as far as they’re willing to explore the cloud.