SAN FRANCISCO — VMware hasn’t traditionally had the best reputation in the open source community, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger admits. In fact, he sums it up in one word: “Bad.”

But VMware’s on a mission to change that. “I would hope that over the next couple of years you will see VMware emerge as one of the most open source friendly companies in the enterprise space in the industry,” Gelsinger said during a press briefing at VMworld.

Looking back five or six years ago, “we were seen as the leader in proprietary infrastructure, software,” Gelsinger said. “We were seen as more benefiting from as opposed to contributing to” the open source community.

But as VMware has sharpened its focus on Kubernetes and acquired Kubernetes-focused startups, that reputation is changing, Gelsinger said.

When VMware started talking with Heptio about purchasing that startup, which it eventually did for $550 million, “Joe and Craig said ‘are you guys really serious about open source? Are you going to be good stewards of Kubernetes?’” And VMware’s commitment to open source became a “litmus test” or sorts, Gelsiner said.

By Joe and Craig, Gelsinger’s referring to Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie, who formed Heptio and were both involved with Google and the platform that eventually became the open source Kubernetes project. Both remain active in the Kubernetes community.

With the Heptio and Bitnami acquisitions, VMware has boosted its ranking and is now the No. 3 contributor to Kubernetes, Gelsinger said.

Last week the vendor announced a deal to acquire Pivotal, and “open source has been a central piece of Pivotal’s strategy,” Gelsinger added.

While Kubernetes is definitely the belle of the ball at this year’s VMworld and played a major role in Gelsinger’s opening keynote, the vendor also announced several updates to its hybrid cloud strategy and portfolio on the opening day of the annual conference.

This included a new partnership with Nvidia to deliver accelerated GPU services for VMware Cloud on AWS. This partnership will give VMware Cloud on AWS customers access to Amazon EC2 bare metal instances accelerated by Nvidia T4 GPUs and new Nvidia vComputeServer software.

It targets artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data analytics workflows. And it compliments another recent VMware acquisition: Bitfusion. This company’s technology also makes GPU capabilities available for AI and machine learning workloads in the enterprise.

“We’re also excited to be working with [Nvidia] on premises as an extension of our Bitfusion acquisition,” Gelsinger said during his keynote. The work will “allow us to fully virtualize and make GPUs and FPGAs a complete and proper element of the compute element we make available through the VMware SDDC [software-defined data center] solution.”

VMware and Amazon Web Services still won’t give any customers counts or revenue figures for their hybrid cloud partnership. They did say, however, that since August 2018, VMware Cloud on AWS customers are up 4x, total VMs are up 9x, the number of partners with VMC Competency is up 3x, and the number of available independent software vendor validated solutions is up 3x.

The partners also announced updates to the service that focus on migrating and modernizing workloads.

VMware and AWS first rolled out this hybrid cloud service at VMworld two years ago. It is now available in 16 AWS regions globally, and it can be purchased from both AWS and VMware and the companies’ respective partner networks.

New VMware HCX capabilities enable push-button migration and interconnectivity between VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs running in different AWS regions and new Elastic vSAN support improves storage scaling.

And as VMware rolls out Kubernetes-focused products and services to its new Tanzu portfolio, these will be made available on VMware Cloud on AWS, Gelsinger said.

Gelsinger also said that VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, first announced at Dell Technologies World earlier this year, is now available to U.S. customers. This co-engineered product uses Dell EMC’s VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure and VMware’s compute, storage, and networking software. VMware manages the cloud service. Gelsinder added that Equinix is a global colocation provider for VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.

The service is also core to Dell Technologies Cloud Data Center-as-a-Service, also unveiled at Dell Technologies World 2019.

Along these lines, Dell Technologies, which owns about 81% of VMware, today said Dell Technologies Cloud will support automated deployment of VMware PKS on Dell EMC VxRail. This new feature adds integrated support for Kubernetes and containers to that hybrid cloud platform.