While most technology vendors have been socked with double-digit declines in sales during the ongoing economic recession, virtualization technologies have been named by many VARs and vendors as something that's been immune to budget cuts.

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That's because virtualization is widely viewed as fulfilling this recession's mantra: "Do more with less."

And judging by the interest of vendors in VMware's VMworld event held this week from Aug. 31 to Sept. 3 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, virtualization technology remains a strong bet for any VAR or vendor looking to beat the odds during this recession. VMware and several other vendors have piled on with technology and partnership announcements at the show.

VMware introduced its vCenter product family, which provides policy-based, service-driven management, building on VMware vSphere 4. VMware says the product family reduces operating costs, simplifies management, and enables delivery of more dynamic and flexible IT services. Sold a la carte, the vCenter family includes four Infrastructure Management technologies and two Service Delivery Management technologies.

EMC announced that it is expanding its business and technology alliance with VMware to help customers with private cloud computing and enabling Tier 1 applications on VMware vSphere 4, as well as streamlining configuration and compliance management and automating IT processes using VMware vCenter and EMC Ionix.

VMware rival Citrix Systems and Xen.org are using the first day of the VMworld event to roll out a strategy for a new open-source cloud computing platform based on the Xen virtualization hypervisor.