Yesterday before the Hadoop Summit even started, co-host Hortonworks decided to debut its product. It launched the HortonWorks Data Platform that the startup touts as a more stable and, more importantly, a partner-centric distribution of the big data-munching software. There’s also strong cloud support in the form of a high-availability edition that is integrated with VMware.

Now it’s Day 1 of the conference, and some of the more patient attendees are starting to unveil their new products as well.  VMware is one of them.

The virtualization giant announced what it codenamed project “Serengeti,” a so-called virtualization- aware Hadoop configuration and management tool–the result of a collaboration with Cloudera, Greenplum, HortonWorks and MapR.

The platform simplifies the process of deploying components such as Hive and Pig in cloud environments, specifically vSphere. The company promises that it will work with the Apache community to create extensions that will extend Serengeti’s capabilities to additional Hadoop-related open product in the future.

In addition, VMware’s existing Spring for Apache Hadoop project received a big boost as well. It’s now integrated with HBase, supports the Cascading dev library and features more security options.

“VMware’s involvement with the Apache Hadoop project and its new Serengeti Apache project are critical moves that could provide enterprises the flexibility that they will need when it comes to prototyping and deploying Hadoop,” said OVUM principal analyst  Tony Baer.

Also today, Pentaho revealed an update of its own. Word was sent out from Summit 2012 that the vendor’s analytics software will be bundled up with the  Dell Apache Hadoop Solution: a combo of Cloudera’s distro and the hardware behemoth’s open Crowbar config utility. The two firms will be offering joint services as well, the release states.