Here are the top stories SDxCentral wrangled this week related to SDN, NFV, cloud, and virtualization infrastructure:

VMware Lays Plans to Become a Cloud Powerhouse — The company tries to find its cloud footing in a world dominated by the likes of Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Cisco Plunges Into Containers, Acquiring ContainerX — The deal suggests that CEO Chuck Robbins is dead serious about Cisco’s future as a software company.

Huawei Launches Commercial SDN Controller — Agile Controller 3.0 fits into the company’s theme of building from an open source base and aiming for the cloud.

Here are the week’s strays and stragglers we roped for you:

Inocybe partnered with Serro, experts in infrastructure design and automation, to provide customers with integration and engineering for the deployment of OpenDaylight-based products and services.

Cloud Technology Partners successfully closed its Series C funding round with prior investors Rackspace, State Street Bank, and Pritzker Group Venture Capital. The amount of funding was not disclosed.

Red Hat released Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, its open infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform for cloud and network functions virtualization (NFV) environments. Separately, VMware introduced VMware Integrated OpenStack 3. Both are based on the OpenStack Mitaka release.

Encompass Digital Media introduced CloudStream, a cloud-based platform powered by Cisco, to its suite of digital services.

Palo Alto Networks opened a data center in the Netherlands to offer WildFire, the company's cloud-based threat analysis and prevention capabilities.

Adlink and Wind River established joint lab facilities in Shanghai and San Jose, California, to promote the adoption of NFV.

Redknee's monetization and subscriber management system, Redknee Unified, was certified as part of the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) OpenNFV Partner Program.

Here are the other stories SDxCentral covered this week: