Creation of an on-site private cloud for agile software development and IT operations, or DevOps, is one of the primary enterprise use cases for open source technology. Going beyond the hypervisor and leveraging VMware’s software-defined data center technologies for compute, network, storage and management, VMware announced partnerships with container management company Docker Inc.  and search giant Google at VMworld 2014.

Under the hood of Docker

The momentum behind Docker has gathered quickly, driving increased interest in Linux containers as a more-efficient application deployment environment. By embracing Docker and containers, VMware seeks to make the operational stack consistent as well as multi-provider. The new collaboration will allow developers and operations staff to use Docker with VMware’s vSphere hypervisor and its vCloud Air environment.

One of Docker’s biggest advantages  is that it’s more efficient than server virtualization technology because there’s no need to run a separate operating system for each application, according to Ben Golub, CEO of Docker. Instead of having a thousand applications running on a thousand different VMs, developers can have those different applications running in containers spread across a limited number of VMs.

In other words, containers are appealing to developers facing virtualization overload. Containers could even be deployed on bare metal servers without VMs for certain workloads.

Venture capitalist Steve Herrod of General Catalyst noted that Docker is designed for stateless apps, whereas VMware is used to support stateful apps. As a result, the combined value of VMware and Docker offers new levels of development and deployment flexibility.

More flexibility with Docker and Project Fargo

Despite talk of competition from containers, virtualization remains an important part of the way enterprise IT works. That said, VMware is hedging its bets with a response to Docker called Project Fargo.

That’s a homegrown technology that Chris Wolf, the hypervisor maker’s CTO for the Americas, described as similar to the open-source tool but with more management flexibility. The experimental software makes it possible to create copies of a virtual machine without quickly and without taking the VM offline. It also allows multiple VMs to share an operating system image with their parent in the same way that multiple containers run on top of a single kernel. Any changes made to common files within so-called child instances are automatically saved locally.

In theory, this approach makes it possible to deploy virtual machines in a matter of milliseconds while also significantly reducing resource utilization.This could lead to more orchestration, automation, management and operations efficiency for developers.

A winning combination

Today, developers are taking highly iterative approaches to building applications involving frequent updates, reducing dependencies by leveraging loosely coupled architectures and designing software to scale across thousands of servers. Docker’s Golub says this trend, coupled with the emergence of new platforms like mobile devices, has added an unprecedented number of moving parts into the service delivery mix that simply can’t be supported by the old way of doing things.

Ultimately, Golub explains, VMware needs to make the new world of “Devs” work better with traditional “Ops.” He believes Docker is one of the tools that can do that. It offers a way to build a self-sufficient and light container which can be replicated identically on different targets. The alliance with Docker should bring DevOps some powerful new flexibility, but VMware would eventually like to own that market itself.