When OpenStack’s directors get together for their first full board meeting tomorrow, one of the biggest items on the agenda will be whether or not to approve, reject or defer the application of prospective new Gold members; VMware, Inteland and NEC, all of whom have signaled their interest in joining the foundation.

The move to team up with OpenStack may come as something of a surprise, given that VMware has long been seen as the chief opposition to the foundation’s open source cloud platform, but recent months have seen something of a thaw in relations between the two.

VMware notably acquired the open source virtual networking firm Nicira – which already belongs to the OpenStack fold – signaling that the company is finally ready to tap into the growing eco-system around the open source platform.

VMware has yet to make an official announcement about the hook up; it’s expected to do so at the VMworld conference that kicks off later today, but there’s little doubt that its decision to join OpenStack is a real boon for the open source cloud platform, which was bolstered just last week by the launch of Airframe from Piston Cloud.

Airframe is essentially a scaled-down version of Piston Cloud’s distro, designed as an easy-install option for testing and demonstrating proofs of concept, yet it still features the full suite of OpenStack services. In addition, Airframe also comes complete with Cloud Foundry, VMware’s open-source platform as a service software, an inclusion that provides further evidence of the new, close cooperation between the two former rivals.

VMware’s application to join OpenStack is dated August 10, and shows that the company will have to pay an annual fee of $66,666.67 for its Gold membership, the cost of this being budgeted at 0.025% of the member’s revenue and capped at $200,000 a year.