The cloud ecosystem marked many advancements at this week’s VMworld 2013 conference in San Fransico. VMware pulled the curtains back on half a dozen new cloud and software-defined data center solutions, a number of big name partners updated their offerings to support the latest releases, and Red Hat unleashed an upgraded version of its cloud management software.

VMware grabbed headlines with NSX, a network virtualization tool that promises to deliver a secure, transparent and easily managed “pool of transport capacity.” NSX was released in conjunction with vSphere 5.5, which introduces Hadoop support and a Flash Read Cache that promises to reduce latency.

Other additions to VMware’s cloud portfolio include the vCloud Hybrid Service, an IaaS offering that targets existing customers, and a storage abstraction layer called Virtual SAN. The latter collapses direct attached storage, flash and disk into a single data store that can be leveraged to simplify VDI and disaster recovery environments.

NetApp also made a number of product announcements at VMworld. The storage vendor unveiled Virtual Storage Console 5.0, Flash Accel 1.2 and a new version of Clustered Data ONTAP that offers support for vSphere 5.5. The company said that the integration streamlines migration of data for large numbers of virtual machines,

Like NetApp, Linux behemoth SUSE is working to strengthen its relationship with VMware. The company revealed on Wednesday that its Linux Enterprise Server platform will available through vCloud Hybrid Service on a monthly subscription basis.

Red Hat, another high-profile open source company, attended VMworld to showcase its rivaling cloud solutions. The vendor exhibited CloudForms 2.1, a hybrid cloud management platform that supports OpenStack and includes a wide range of enterprise features such as self-service provisioning, workload discovery and delegated power operations.