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Today VMware announced VMware vFabric Suite 5.1, expected to be generally available in Q2 2012.

vFabric Suite 5.1 includes vFabric Application Director, to automate the deployment and management of vFabric applications on VMware cloud infrastructure and SQLFire Enterprise Edition, an in-memory distributed SQL database that will enable application data to meet cloud scale with the needed performances.

vFabric Suite leverages Spring development framework, inherited from SpringSource acquisition in 2009, vFabric application services and a per-VM licensing model to provide a comprehensive infrastructure oriented to the deployment of cloud-ready applications.

Part of this broader shift in application infrastructure was the move to cloud and application deployment on virtual infrastructure. Traditional application servers simply weren’t designed, optimized or licensed for this new world. These legacy systems are too cumbersome, too costly, and definitely not cloud-ready. We saw the need for a new breed of application infrastructure to support this new world of applications.

said Jerry Chen, vice president, Cloud and Application Services, VMware.

Here follows a quote of the original news:

The VMware vFabric Suite provides a complete set of runtime services to build, run and manage modern applications in distributed, cloud environments.  The new capabilities in vFabric Suite 5.1 will allow customers to:

• Automate application deployment for operational efficiency –To drive greater efficiency and better performance, vFabric Suite will include vFabric Application Director™ and vFabric Application Performance Manager. vFabric Application Director automates the deployment of applications through easy-to-use blueprints with standardized templates, component libraries and workflows. vFabric Application Performance Manager provides comprehensive monitoring of end-user transactions, Java code, middleware servers, and VMware vSphere hosts, enabling customers to proactively manage application performance, find and fix problems quickly, and meet SLAs.
• Maximize data scalability – Many of today’s mobile and web-oriented applications must support highly variable access patterns, putting pressure on any database-only approach to data management. To support this evolution, in-memory databases have emerged as a standard component of the core technology stack developers use today.  VMware vFabric SQLFireis an in-memory distributed SQL database built on the strength of vFabric GemFire®,which is used by many of the most demanding applications in the world. vFabric SQLFire delivers dynamic scalability and high performance for modern, data-intensive applications all accessible through a familiar SQL interface.
  By pooling memory, CPU and network resources across a cluster of machines, vFabric SQLFire eliminates the main performance bottleneck in traditional databases – disk access.  vFabric SQLFire can manage data across geographies, accelerating application performance, minimizing latency and increasing reliability. vFabric SQLFire Professional will be included in the vFabric Suite 5.1.
• Reduce database total cost of ownership –To reduce database costs and increase agility vFabric Suite 5.1 will include vFabric Postgres, a VMware-optimized relational SQL database. vFabric Postgres is fully compatible with open source PostgreSQL, enabling customers to leverage existing standard PostgreSQL tools. vFabric Postgres comes in a virtual appliance and has virtualization optimizations such as elastic database memory to share database memory pools and smart configuration to reduce tuning time after resizing virtual machines.
• Provide enterprise support for popular open source technologies – The VMware vFabric Suite 5.1 will include support for the open source runtime components most frequently used in production deployments of Spring applications, including Apache Tomcat, Apache HTTP Server and RabbitMQ® messaging. This greatly simplifies the adoption path of vFabric technologies for those organizations using these open source components today.
  “From the increasing number of programming languages used to the heterogeneous nature of today’s hybrid infrastructures, application development is changing quickly,” said Stephen O’Grady, principal analyst with RedMonk. “Faced with such diversity, enterprises are increasingly turning to lightweight application containers to ease the pains of deployment.”