vmware vcloud

virtualization leader vmware has officially entered into the cloud computing space with vcloud. they've been promising this for over a year, and it has finally happened. the vcloud api allows for enterprises to deploy an internal cloud. this cloud, of course, is supposed to be based upon a software stack of vmware technologies. it does not seem possible to swap out vmware components for equivalent solutions from other providers. so, while this would enable vmware customers features such as elastic computing, i would argue that vendor lock-in excludes it from being an actual cloud.