The old saying, “if you can’t beat ’em, join’ em” rang true this week with the introduction of a free Linux distribution from VMware, Inc., the proprietary kingpin of the server world. The move marks the latest turning point in its strategy to address the rise of containers, but the virtualization giant’s strategy is far more nuanced than simply matching the competition.

The open-source technology has emerged as a threat to the hypervisor maker’s long-dominant flavor of virtualization with the sudden push toward production-readiness in the upstream community. With its supporters’ vision of a future populated by fleets of lightweight containers running on similarly slimmed-down versions of Linux from the likes of Red Hat Inc. edging closer to reality, the new homegrown distribution represents a well-timed effort by VMware to slow the advance.

Photon, as the platform is known, checks in at about one-tenth the size of the typical Linux image used in virtual machines, thanks to a drastically reduced feature set that leaves only the bare minimum needed to operate. The only departure from that minimalistic approach is VMware’s inclusion of support for no fewer than three separate containerization technologies.

The list consists of Docker, Inc.’s namesake implementation, which sparked the trend, an emerging alternative called Rocket that launched in December and a third option from Pivotal Software Inc. – a sister company of VMware – dubbed Garden. That selection provides the ability to create the same kind of low-footprint environments that the likes of Red Hat are touting,

Rather than deploying directly on servers as its rival’s distribution does, Photon is designed to run inside virtual machines powered by VMware’s hypervisor. That negates the main benefits of using containers in production clusters, namely their small footprint and portability across different types of infrastructure, but makes the company’s platform much more attractive for running development environments that already use the technology.

And that’s the ultimate goal of Photon. Software engineers, rather than the operational professionals that have traditionally used VMware’s software, are the driving force behind the adoption of containers, making them a natural target of its plan to address the technology. The strategy is a coordinated effort with Pivotal, which introduced a new open-source initiative of its own in conjunction with VMware to help simplify the creation of containerized applications.

Dubbed Lattice, the project continues the emphasis on minimalism and offers a slimmed-down version of the popular VMware-created Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service that takes less overhead to deploy, thereby making it easier to take advantage of the built-in development capabilities. The combination of the technologies provides a strong argument in favor of using the company’s hypervisor that’s amplified by the fact that it’s already powering most enterprises’ core applications.

And once developers are running their application projects on VMware-virtualized infrastructure, it becomes a much simpler matter to target those workloads after they move into production, which is what is ultimately at stake in fight over the future of virtualization. To that end, the company is introducing yet another open-source solution called Lightwave that provides controls for regulating access to instances, invaluable functionality for large enterprises with strict compliance requirements governing their live processes.