There’s few more exciting topics in infrastructure software than containerization at the moment, and with good reason too. As an easy-to-use and lightweight alternative to virtualization, there’s been lots of discussion about it either one day replacing virtualization completely, or at least carving a decent-sized slice of the pie for itself.

If and when that happens, it could be bad news for the VMware, the company that’s seen as the grand-daddy of virtualization. Or at least you would think that’s the case, but apparently it’s not so, at least according to the company’s end-user computing CTO Kit Colbert.

In a blog post this week, Colbert shed the light on how VMware is perceiving containerization, and somewhat surprisingly, he claims the company is all for it. And not only that, for Colbert claims that VMware even pioneered the technology more than three years ago.

According to Colbert, “VMware sees tremendous value in containers”. He goes on to write that it’s “actually been a huge proponent of containers for many years now”, before claiming that “You could even call us a pioneer of containers in the enterprise space”, pointing to the Warden for CloudFoundry system it launched back in 2011.

Colbert explains that VMware launched Warden for CloudFoundry because it saw the need for simple application delivery within an isolated operating system environment. “Thus we’re very excited to see Docker catalyzing the industry around containers, as they streamline application delivery and help to make customers even more successful,” he adds.

Somewhat predictably, Colbert doesn’t go the whole hog and embrace the idea of containers as the heir to virtualization. Rather, he’s one of these who believes containerization will live side-by-side with virtualization. That’s because container technology is still a bit risky, and lacks the kind of management and robustness that VMware’s virtualization systems provide. Hence, he says that containers might work better if they’re run inside a virtual machine, giving system admins the best of both worlds.

Such an idea would certainly give VMware a better shot at protecting itself from containerization’s growth, and the company has scheduled several VMworld sessions around the topic, with the theme “better together”. One of these will even see Docker’s CEO Ben Golub appear alongside VMware’s CTO Chris Wolf in an attempt to explain the concept further.

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