Canonical and VMware announced today a collaborative partnership that will allow organizations to deploy VMware software and technologies with Canonical's OpenStack distribution.

In a statement today, the two companies said that in collaborating on this agreement, customers will have the flexibility to deploy and run efficient and reliable OpenStack clouds using the two sets of technologies.

The OpenStack project is a series of open-source software and services designed for cloud computing services. IBM, Dell, HP, Seagate and Rackspace, among others, are just a few of the 150 members supporting the OpenStack standards.

Canonical's Ubuntu Cloud, described as one of the most widely used OpenStack distributions, will now include the plugins necessary to operate in conjunction with VMware technologies, such as vSphere or Vicira NVP.

As part of the OpenStack "Grizzy" release earlier this month, VMware added supporting code to vSphere to support the OpenStack Compute project, known as "Nova."

VMware said it "reaffirms its support of Ubuntu as a fully supported guest operating system" on vSphere. The Ubuntu operating system maker and the virtualization technology giant will collaborate on software testing, customer support and deployment automation.