For a conference organized by the world’s largest server visualization vendor, VMworld 2014 places very little emphasis on servers. But that should hardly come as a surprise these days, given VMware Inc.’s aggressive bid to move beyond its hypervisor roots and up the enterprise food chain with value-added capabilities. Nowhere is that push more evident than in the VMware ecosystem, the company’s revenue lifeline, which saw a string of major partnership announcements on the first day of the event underscoring its push to diversify software sales.

In the public cloud, VMware revealed a three-way alliance with some of the hottest names in the industry aimed at providing support for applications leveraging the Docker container engine, which is considered a threat to VMware’s virtualization platform on its public cloud.  The company will collaborate directly with Docker Inc. to provide compatibility across both off- and on-premise customer environments and also work with fellow EMC Corp. subsidiary Pivotal Inc. and Google to extend integration to some of the more popular third party tools for the project. Included on the list are the search giant’s recently released Kubernetes management software, the homegrown Warden container provisioning utility for Cloud Foundry and a number of open-source libraries.

At the same time, Delphix Inc., made its flagship Virtual Data Platform available on VMware’s vCloud Air (formerly vCloud Hybrid Service). The product, which is used by IBM, eBay Inc. and several other technology heavy-hitters, enables users to create a so-called master copy of a given workload and deliver that image on-demand instead of creating duplicates for every team that may require access to that application. The firm claims that the solution can shave up to 90 percent off hardware costs, which makes it complementary to the pay-as-you-go model of the public cloud.

To help organizations access the fast-expanding roster of capabilities available on its infrastructure-as-a-service platform, VMware has teamed up with AT&T Corp. to provide private uplinks to vCloud Air. That means customers now have the choice of connecting to the on-premise component of their environments directly instead of having to go through a provider, which is faster and eliminates the added operational risks associated with introducing another moving piece into the mix.

VMware is also extending its networking focus into the data center with NSX, a programmable solution for managing transport capacity based on technology it obtained as part of the acquisition of Nicira Inc. in 2012. The conference has seen several big-name vendors throw their weight behind the platform, starting with Hewlett-Packard Co., which announced that it has integrated it with the internally-developed Virtual Application Networks SDN Controller to provide customers with a single interface for managing their networks, including both physical and virtual components. That paves a relatively smooth migration path for traditional organizations that are taking a gradual approach to adopting SDN and have to maintain their existing investments in the meanwhile.

Not leaving HP’s pivot unanswered, Dell Inc. extended its own partnership with VMware to package NSX into a converged infrastructure bundle for mid-market customers. Additionally, the companies have signed an agreement with mutual ally Cumulus Networks Inc. to provide support for the platform on Dell switches running the latter’s Linux-based networking operating system.

And  over on the storage side, Zadara Inc. updated its OpenStack-powered array to deliver 40 Gigabit Ethernet leveraging the iSCSI Extensions for RDMA  (iSER) protocol  for better response times in VMware-virtualized environments. The upgrade is available for free to organizations that have signed up for company’s recently launched OPaaS payment scheme, which makes it possible to purchase a physical appliance on a pay-as-you-go model basis as if it were a cloud service.