VMware Monday was set to announce two new products well as a major release of its vCenter Lab Manager 4.

The new products are vCenter AppSpeed, derived from VMware’s acquisition of Beehive, and Chargeback, developed in-house.

According to Raghu Raghuram, general manager of VMware’s server business unit, “If the first wave of the virtualization revolution was about reducing capital expenditures, the next is innovative virtualization management capabilities that allow IT to extricate itself from mundane tasks, become more productive, and reduce IT operating costs.”

The new vCenter products are supposed to provide greater efficiency in the data center, more control over service levels and greater flexibility.

AppSpeed, which will cost $1,250 per CPU, provides service-level reporting and proactive performance management for multi-tier applications running in virtual machines. It gives administrators visibility across all tiers of an application, providing views of application performance, usage and dependencies across both the virtual and physical infrastructure.

Within minutes of installation it’s supposed to discover, monitor and report on application performance and uptime, troubleshoot and resolve performance issues, and virtualize faster. It’s about optimizing application performance and saving time in identifying root-cause of potential issues with application performance.

Chargeback, which runs $750 per CPU, offers accountability across the business by allocating and reporting on costs associated with the use of virtual infrastructure. With it, base cost models, fixed costs and other factors can be mapped to data center resources and then applied across cost centers.

Business units should get a clear view into the resources consumed and their costs – enabling “showback” of valuable information, even for organizations not yet ready to chargeback to the business.

VMware thinks it will help the IT environment transition from a cost center to a “value center.”

Lab Manager 4, first introduced in 2006 and now in its fourth generation, provides IT with an internal cloud for the dev/test of complex multi-tier applications. It means on-demand, role-based access to a shared library of pre-configured multi-VM environments, eliminating repetitive system setup and teardown, while maintain security and administrative control.

New features include unification with VMware Stage Manager, creating a single solution to encompass multiple use cases including streamlined application delivery from development to production; simplified release management; better training, support and online demo environments; next-generation network fencing capabilities to better support teams working on multiple instances of extremely large-scale application environments; and support for both ESX and ESXi form factors to give administrators more deployment choices for internal cloud resources.

Lab Manager will go for $1,495 per CPU.