VMworld doesn’t start until today, but the floodgates are already wide open. VMware Inc. set the tone for its much-anticipated event after leaking a series of major updates that would normally have been reserved for the keynote address days ahead of the official kickoff, beginning with one of its most important acquisitions in recent memory.

A Wednesday post on the virtualization giant’s blog revealed that it has picked up CloudVolumes Inc., a San Francisco startup specializing in application delivery, for an undisclosed amount. The three-year-old firm offers a solution that breaks down programs to their most basic components and places those pieces in shared spaces from where they can be made available to thousands of end-points with just a few clicks.

That eliminates the need to perform location installations, thereby greatly accelerating provisioning times and improving resources utilization. The technology has the potential to bring VMware much closer to its long-coveted goal of displacing Citrix Systems Inc. as the dominant force in the desktop virtualization market.

The following morning, VMware wrote that it renamed its vCloud Hybrid Service to vCloud Air and rolled out a new partner program aimed at bringing the platform to more regions faster. Underscoring the aggressive initiative is an emphasis on transparency expressed in the form of a badging system designed to avoid conflicting messaging in the channel. Participating service providers receive clear-cut designations indicating to CIOs whether they support its managed desktop virtualization solution, provide interoperability with customer deployments, use its software to power their infrastructure or a combination.

Taking VMware’s cue, the ecosystem has also been unusually active ahead of the event. Linux powerhouse Canonical Ltd. sent the dominos falling on the day of the rebranding by certifying Ubuntu for use on vCloud Air as part of an expanded partnership with the virtualization giant. Over 70 percent of workloads hosted in the public cloud today are estimated to run on the distribution, making the addition a crucial milestone in VMware’s bid to become a bigger player in the infrastructure-as-a-service space.

Hewlett-Packard Co. one-upped Canonical on Friday and extended its own relationship with the hypervisor maker deeper into the storage stack. The hardware giant released an upgraded StoreVirtual multipathing extension that’s exclusive to VMware environments, integrated its OneView management software with vSphere and announced a collaboration with the company to make the virtual volume feature planned for release on the latter platform available on all 3PAR arrays.

Nutanix Inc., one of HP’s fastest-growing competitors in the converged infrastructure market and a fellow VMware partner, likewise spilled the beans on its plans for VMworld 2014. Among other things, the firm revealed that it will unveil a brand new appliance dubbed NX-8150 built specifically for powering storage-intensive applications such as databases and email servers.

The box is set to have a tough competing for attention with MARVIN, a rival hyperconvergence solution VMware is rumored to have developed in collaboration with parent company EMC Corp. that is also expected to make its formal debut at the event. Initially known in the press by the codename Project Mystic, the hush-hush platform is expected to combine homegrown management software with commodity hardware in a tightly-integrated package that can be provisioned as a single unit.

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