A number of updates were revealed this week, and out of the ones in this roundup three of them involve VMware in one way or another. The first one, however, comes from Cloudability, and it doesn’t involve the virtualization firm in any way.

Cloudability makes software that monitors usage across IaaS and PaaS accounts. It aims to mitigate human error by tracking and notifying the admin of any unused cloud resources, and this concept earned the startup $8.7 million  from a Series A funding round it announced this week. It was led by the Foundry Group with participation from Trinity and 500 Startups.

Moving on to VMware, the company released the latest version of its popular Zimbra enterprise messaging and scheduling software. V8.0 does a few things better than its predecessor, namely because it is integrated with a lot more third party services, comes with an SDK that allows a client to connect to even more offerings, and an enhanced UI that features new capabilities, such as the ability to call mobile devices.

The last couple of updates tie in with Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open-source PaaS. A lot of interesting stuff has been going on around it lately.

For one thing Appsecute is offering a new cloud service that allows admins to monitor apps running in Foundry-based environments. It’s a web-based solution that focuses on developers just as much as the bigger fish.

ActiveState in turn offers its own Foundry-based software: Stackato. The second release of the platform-as-a-service rolled out this week, bringing with it a number of improvements and extended support. Stackato can now run applications built on Microsoft’s popular .NET framework thanks to integration with Tier’s 3 Iron Foundry. The open-source branch was launched late last year.