I listened to a VMware “sneak peek” briefing on new products for 2009 today but all I got was mostly a rehash of the laundry list the company outlined at its annual conference last fall.

Most disappointing: VMware would not disclose expected dates of release or pricing for the products , which include a virtual datacenter operating system, application services including fault tolerance and data recovery, and new vStorage, vNetworking and vCloud Services.

VMware broke down the expansive lineup as announced last year but also shed light on a series of new “vCenter” virtual services coming in 2009, including transparent chargeback, intelligent capacity IQ, simplified configuration, profiles, unified operations and business continuity.

vCenter, which is complementary to the company’s Virtual Center platform, is not a product per se but a collection of new services being offered for virtual machines.

vCenter Capacity IQ, for example, allows for proactive planning for virtual machines. vCenter Chargeback automated the chargeback model for greater visibility of costs, VMware says.

vCenter ConfigControl automates discovering and tracking of configured items.

vCenter Profiles simplifies setup.

vCenter AppSpeed offers automated SLA management. It is designed as a real-time performance monitoring and remediation tool used to guarantee service levels. It will be able to monitor applications from an end user perspective, proactively detect end user performance issues and collect and correlate performance across different tiers of the application.

The webcast presentation offered a good explanation of things to come but no new information on the platform components, aside from the vCenter services. Dates of availability would have been nice but frankly, in this economic climate, I am not sure many IT organizations’ budgets would absorb the costs of these virtual services this year anyway. VMware’s aggressive lineup - illustrated by the datacenter operating system nomenclature - is clearly designed to put pressure on newcomer Microsoft and app delivery giant Citrix, which bought XenSource last year.