VMware Inc. has followed up on a promise it made earlier this year to open-source its Photon Controller.

The Photon Controller is a component of VMware’s much-hyped Photon Platform, a new infrastructure stack built for running “cloud native” (or containerized) applications that the company rolled out at this year’s VMworld event. Other components of the Photon Platform include Photon OS, a new, stripped down Linux; and Photon Machine, a lightweight version of its ESX hypervisor.

Readers can think of the Photon Controller as a kind of open-source version of the vCenter Server that’s used to deploy components such as Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, Mesos or Pivotal Cloud Foundry at scale in multi-tenanted environments. Essentially, it acts as a fabric for these microservices, automating the work they perform.

VMware’s original plan called for Photon Controller to be made available for free, as a supported version, and deeply-integrated with NSX. However, the company has gone slightly further than first anticipated by actually open-sourcing the software (as opposed to just making it free) in an effort to persuade others to support more hypervisors for it, therefore making it useful for a wider audience. As the company said in its press release, open-sourcing the platform allows them to “engage directly with developers, customers and partners”.

With Photon Controller, VMware is hoping to achieve two things. First, it’s catering to existing customers already invested in its virtualization goodies but who’re growing interested in containers. Second, it’s hoping to attract the attention of startups who’re diving straight into containers, without bothering with virtual machines. VMware’s strengths include strong network virtualization and a rich array of management tools, and so the thinking is that any container stack will be more manageable by going through VMware.

The VMware Photon Controller is available today and is being demoed at booth 32 in the Hallway Community Theater in Barcelona at DockerCon Europe 2015.