VMworld 2012 is coming later this month, and VMware is already starting to up its cloud play to give customers plenty to talk about ahead of the gathering.

This week the virtualization firm unveiled a very reasonable trial version of its vCloud management platform. For a few cents an hour prospective users can get their hands on a Linux VM that runs the software with 1 GB of RAM for testing purposes. This limited version includes all of the features that come with the standard edition.

vCloud is rivaled by OpenStack, and this week one cloud provider published some data that interested parties within the open source community should definitely take into consideration. ezCloud took the OpenStack-powered HP Cloud Services for a test run and encountered an average failure rate of 35 percent when provisioning instances. The IaaS provider made several other discoveries but this one in particular stands out: OpenStack doesn’t come with sufficient built-in monitoring capabilities, and that could prove to be a barrier for future adaptors of the cloud OS.

Over in the personal cloud arena, Microsoft is doing its best to make its SkyDrive service more competitive in what is an extremely crowded market. The software giant had a massive roll out that included an Android application, a web API and an enhanced option for third party apps, plus performance improvements for the Windows and Mac clients. Lastly, Microsoft also overhauled the Skydrive web app with a polished interface that packs a few new capabilities.

Teradici also had a Windows update this week. The desktop virtualization firm added Windows Server RDS support to its PC-over-IP protocol, extending it beyond VMware environments. This way customers don’t have to purchase and maintain separate solutions from other vendors, but can instead opt to use Teradici for both of the platforms.