VMware updated the world on its major container initiatives during this morning's VMworld keynote, pointing out that vSphere Integrated Containers and Project Photon have both reached general availability.

The technologies were introduced at last year's VMworld as technology previews. Both are open source projects, with code available on Github.

Kit Colbert, CTO of the cloud platform business unit, spent more time on stage discussing vSphere Integrated Containers. That's understandable considering the purpose behind that program: to bring containers to vSphere. Put another way, it's a way to prevent VMware's flagship product from being left behind as containers gain popularity.

Of course, VMware's other tools tie into vSphere Integrated Containers. Colbert showed how NSX can be used to create isolated security groups (something NSX can do for any containers, actually) and how vRealize, the VMware management suite, can be used for troubleshooting the resulting container network.

The company added a couple of open source tools to go with vSphere Integrated Containers. Harbor is a registry specifically for the vSphere container environment. And Admiral is a management portal designed for teams to work together on container-based applications.

Colbert also listed some container-minded partners for vSphere Integrated Containers, although he didn't give specifics of what they're up to. The names that flashed on the screen behind him were CoreOS, Hashicorp, JFrog, Mesosphere, Pivotal, and Rancher Labs.

Contrasted with the vSphere discussion, VMware's Photon — the software for all-container environments — got more of a cameo role in the keynote.

In addition to the free version of the software, there's a commercial version, launched in June, that goes under the name of VMware-Pivotal Cloud-Native Stack v1.0, Colbert explained.

Next steps for Photon include integration of Kubernetes and NSX, he said.