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Dell has been busy this week. Today they announced the acquisition of Clerity, a mainframe migration and modernization solution provider, and the intent to fold them into their services division. Clerity is one of the leaders in mainframe "rehosting" or the ability to migrate apps from legacy mainframes to equipment elsewhere that can provide the same service at reduced cost.

Yesterday, the company announced they would acquire Wyse Technology, which sells thin clients and cloud management and desktop virtualization (DVI) management software tools. Wyse also has a huge patent portfolio and has been around since the early days of the PC era. Back then, they sold low-cost green-screen terminals and became second only to IBM in that market. They used this expertise to move into selling thin clients that first worked with Windows Terminal Servers and eventually became more DVI-oriented.

Today VMware released Fusion 4, the latest in its line of desktop virtualization products for Mac OS X. Promising a "more Mac-like experience," Fusion 4 sports a revised user interface, and the ability to virtualize Mac OS X, Fusion 4 has a lot to offer.

I had a chance to get my hands on the release a bit early, so I decided to take VMware Fusion 4 for a spin to see what it has to offer. The early verdict? Fusion 4 is a no-brainer upgrade for folks already using VMware Fusion, and a good choice for new switchers who need a way to run Windows apps on their Mac.

It's been a crazy conference week with VMworld and Dreamforce '11 going on at the same time. News from those shows have been all over ReadWriteWeb's channels this week, like the VMware vFabric Data Director announcement, and CloudStack going 100% open source.

We also looked at storing Salesforce data locally, and Microsoft's digs at a certain virtualization vendor over cloud computing.

Earlier this week Oracle took the wraps off of Oracle VM 3. Oracle's Adam Hawley, senior director of product management, says that Oracle VM 3 is ready to roll out across the entire data center, and not just for managing Oracle's applications.

Earlier this month VMware announced a new pricing scheme for vSphere that immediately raised the ire of many customers. VMware has now revised its pricing scheme again, this time increasing the per-license entitlement for vRAM, which should help customers affected by the earlier change contain costs.

VMware shifted the basis of pricing from CPU cores to vRAM, which some customers expected would triple costs even though VMware claimed it would simplify and reduce costs. One commenter in the VMware forums wrote "You could go out and buy the physical box for way less than that today, from any hardware vendor."

In VMware's earning call CEO Paul Maritz said that most customers costs won't be changed by the new pricing scheme for the company's updated vSphere product, reports CRN.

"We believe that 95 percent of customers will see no change in their licensing costs. From our calculations, most customers will see no change and won't be required to pay us more money," Maritz said during the call.

By now the use of phones as the second factor in a security solution is well known and there are any number of vendors operating in this space. Even Google and Facebook have added this to their services, as we wrote about earlier this summer.

Things have been quiet on the Zimbra front for some time now, so it's nice to hear a little news: VMware has released a Zimbra client for Android. But it describes the apps as a "fling."

Zimbra for Android is free, but there is no support and no guarantee that it will ever become part of an official product offering. In other words, it's nothing you want to seriously deploy, but if you're both a Zimbra user and an Android user you might want to check it out and give VMware your feedback.

VMware announced that it will acquire Digital Fuel, an IT financial software-as-a-service provider, for an undisclosed amount. Last week, Globes speculated that Digital Fuel would be acquired for $85 million.

VMware has been on an acquisition spree, having acquired Socialcast and SlideRocket in the past two months.

The recent security breach at Citibank, coupled with even RSA hiring what may be its first Chief Security Officer Edward Schwartz, point out that you can never be too paranoid about your personal and corporate data security. RSA was in the news earlier this year for an attach on its SecurID two-factor tokens, something that had been considered the ultimate in enterprise security.

It might be time to take another look at two-factor authentication, and see if it makes sense to implement this in your organization. Here are three basic steps to get started: