On Aug. 25, 2014 at VMworld(R) 2014, VMware, Inc. announced joint initiatives with Docker, Google and Pivotal to help enterprises run and manage container-based applications on a common platform at scale in private, public and hybrid clouds. The collaboration will enable enterprises to leverage their existing VMware infrastructure as a unified, scalable and secure platform for running and managing enterprise applications whether in a container or a virtual machine or a container within a virtual machine in a platform as a service.

In cooperation with Docker, Google, and Pivotal, VMware will enable enterprises to run and manage their containerized applications on their VMware infrastructure or on VMware vCloud(R) Air(TM) hybrid service, while minimizing complexity by reducing the need to build out new and separate infrastructure silos for their container initiatives. By offering a common platform, developers will gain the speed and agility they need while providing IT teams with the control they require. Additionally, VMware will bring to bear its compute, management, storage, networking and security capabilities to container environments.

By running containers within virtual machines on- or off-premises, enterprises will benefit from high performance, security isolation, dynamic virtual networking, software-defined storage and the broad ecosystem of third-party products built for virtual machines. Docker, Google and Pivotal are committing to multiple areas of collaboration with VMware including: Docker and VMware will collaborate on enabling Docker Engine on VMware workflows from build to deploy for VMware vSphere(R) to VMware vCloud Air; Docker and VMware will collaborate on Docker-related open source projects libswarm, libcontainer and libchan; Docker and VMware will jointly work on furthering areas of interoperability between their products including Docker Hub with VMware vCloud Air, VMware vCenter Server(TM) and VMware vCloud(R) Automation Center(TM); VMware has joined the Kubernetes community and will make Kubernetes' patterns, APIs and tools available to enterprises; Google and VMware will work together to bring the pod based networking model of Open vSwitch to enable multi-cloud integration of Kubernetes; VMware has contributed code to bring Kubernetes to VMware vSphere to make it easy for enterprises get started with container management; and, VMware, Pivotal and Docker will collaborate on enhancing the Docker libcontainer project with capabilities from Warden, a Linux Container technology originally developed at VMware for Cloud Foundry.