A couple of interesting updates are coming out of EMC’s virtualization subsidiary VMware. The first highlight is a fresh Evan Data survey which concluded that developers find Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open-source platform-as-a-service offering, to be the best PaaS of its kind overall.

Cloud Foundry ranked first among 14 different cloud platform providers, thanks to a number of factors–namely reliability, the development tools it provides, and of course price.

“The top three competitors were very close, with one appealing to private cloud development, one to public and Cloud Foundry appealing to both,” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, in a statement “This is important because many cloud deployments are hybrid clouds blending private, public and on-premises instances. Flexibility is key.”

While Cloud Foundry is the highest ranking offering overall, IBM got the top spot among private cloud platforms.  Participants cited security, auto-scaling and service level among other things. In turn, Google ranked number one as the best public cloud dev PaaS, and Evans Data’s researchers named it as the vendor with the “most market potential and best vision for the future.”

In addition to the new positive PR boost VMware received, it debuted version 4.1 of its Fusion desktop virtualization software yesterday. One of the more notable highlights is that the company made a soon-to-be-fixed blunder with the first release v4.1, and provided a loophole through which users can run Snow Leopard within Lion.  The software places the responsibility on the user’s shoulders by displaying warning encouraging users to comply with Apple’s EULA rather than a simple error message.

Apple however, is known for maintaining a very closed ecosystem, with its its desktop line-up being no exception. In light of this fact (and Apple’s history of taking legal actions against companies that don’t agree with its policy), VMware promptly announced in a blog post it will release a patch.