After months of speculation topped with a string of earlier-than-expected product announcements in the week leading up to the conference, VMworld 2014 is finally here, and it’s living up the hype. VMworld Inc. kicked off the first day of its buzzed-about customer conference in San Francisco with the formal introduction of the hush-hush project that had partners and competitors alike biting their nails for the last two quarters.

Marvin has officially arrived. The platform, which was initially known as “Project Mystic” when word first emerged of VMware’s plans to break into the converged infrastructure market back in May, now goes by the designation EVO:Rail but otherwise keeps true to the original rumor. It wraps an integrated management layer consisting of the company’s hypervisor and software-defined storage solution around a discrete package of commodity hardware from manufacturing partners.

The product, the first in a series of appliances, packs four Intel E5-2620 v2 nodes along with more than 13 terabytes of flash-accelerated storage capacity in a 2U chassis small enough for proof-of-concept environments and branch offices. A single EVO:Rail can support 100 server images or 250 virtual desktops and stacked together with as many as three for a 16-node cluster, according to VMware, a cap that is set to increase with future iterations.

Like competing hyperconverged solutions from the likes of Nutanix Inc. and SimpliVity Inc, the system allows admins to treat the individual hardware elements as a single logical unit instead of having to provision each separately. Needless to say, that approach offers much greater simplicity compared to traditional converged modules such as the Vblocks offered by VCE (a venture between VMware parent company EMC Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc.) which merely combine compute, storage and transport capacity in a single box. That makes EVO:Rail a direct threat to the jointly-owned firm in a textbook case of product cannibalization, but the companies don’t plan on allowing the situation to continue for long.

VMware is bringing the flexibility of the appliance to Vblocks with a new offering called vRealize Suite that unifies its existing management and automation products under a cohesive license. The combined whole does much more than merely streamline pricing, extending the capabilities of its individual components beyond the data center and into the public cloud to make it easier for customers realize the elusive promise of hybrid computing.

To that end, the vRealize Suite packs integration with Amazon.com’s market-leading infrastructure-as-a-service platform and, more importantly, VMware’s competing vCloud Air. Against the backdrop of the suite making its debut,  the portfolio  has been expanded with a number of new managed options that take direct aim at the retail giant.

VMware’s public cloud now features an extensive set of mobile management and development capabilities, including the collection of backend features that Pivotal Software Inc., another subsidiary of EMC, unveiled as part of the announcement bonanza leading up to VMworld 2014. Also new to the platform is a dedicated option for privacy-conscious enterprises, an object storage store that provides an alternative to Amazon’s S3 and last but not least, an infrastructure-agnostic application management service called vRealize Air Automation.

VMware is continuing the vendor-independence in the data center with vRealize Operations Insight, a module for the on-premise edition of Sphere with Operations Management – one of the components of the suite – that offers monitoring and capacity planning functionality. It’s joined by what is arguably the single most important new product to have come out of the conference thus far including EVO:Rail: VMware Integrated OpenStack.

The homegrown distribution makes the management capabilities of VMware’s software available atop the private cloud platform in a bid to combine the best of two worlds: the stability and maturity of proprietary solutions with the velocity of the  community. In the spirit of open-source, the company is also making that functionality is available for competing distros from Red Hat Inc. Inc., Mirantis Inc. and a number of other partners.

Allowing admins to manage OpenStack clusters from the same interface they’ve been using to provision their virtual infrastructure  might just provide the push needed to propel the project into the enterprise mainstream. As for VMware, it’s looking to be cementing itself as the lynchpin between the open-source private cloud and the Amazon-dominated public cloud, a powerful position to drive long-term growth for the EMC federation as  whole.