Alongside the fresh-faced startups showcasing their wares at DockerCon 2015 this morning is VMware Inc. with two new tools aimed at helping developers take better advantage of the wildly popular containerization engine in their projects. Or in the case of the first addition, provide the environment for running those projects.

The aptly-named AppCatalyst is a self-contained sandbox specifically geared towards Docker that combines the slimmed-down version of Linux the virtualization giant introduced three months ago with configuration and orchestration capabilities for managing the instances deployed on top. The small footprint of the distribution allows developers to run the entire environment locally on their machines.

That provides a potentially much more straightforward alternative to spinning up (and paying for) a Docker cluster on one of the numerous public clouds that offer pre-configured containers or, much more typically in the enterprises that VMware is targeting, asking the operations team. That brings down the entry barrier to the technology yet another notch for corporate developers.

VMware hopes to match that on the other side of the IT divide with the same stroke through the second tool it unveiled at the conference this morning, which provides a similarly integrated feature set for administrators to provision containers. Project Bonneville allows applications to be deployed through the company’s ubiquitous virtualization management platform with a fraction of the manual work needed now.

The technology  automatically deploys each instance in its own dedicated virtual machine, an approach that addresses the inherent security isolation of Docker that has been keeping traditional organizations from joining the bandwagon. The downside is that the added complexity of having an extra abstraction results in increased overhead that somewhat diminishes the whole point of using containers – their efficiency – in the first place.

But VMware promises that do away with much of that overhead using a replication capabilities introduced in the most recent release of its management platform that only copies the minimal amount of data needed to fire up a virtual machine to the target host and selectively adds files from there onwards. That kills two birds with one stone, cutting  hardware requirements while speeding up installation times since fewer files to load means a shorter journey over the network and quicker boot times.

VMware claims that this allows virtual machines to launch about as fast as containers, which is a much more acceptable operational sacrifice to make. That’s especially true given that the software synergizes quite well as AppCatalyst installations.

Developers can exploit the portability of Docker to quickly push changes from their local sandboxes to their organization’s main Project Bonneville-based testing environment. As containers continue to evolve and development projects gradually turn into production deployments in the enterprise, the combined value proposition of the technologies will only become more appealing, putting VMware in a stronger position to address the trend.