xhyve is extremely cool technology which wraps the native OS X Hypervisor Framework for a virtualization backend. No longer do we need a heavy weight VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion or Parallels Desktop installed and running as a “side car” to run Linux programs on a Mac.

I’ve been following community efforts about running Docker under xhyve for a while now, but there’s nothing like Docker Inc. packaging it up. There are some really hard problems around virtual machines, filesystems and networking that Docker has fixed and will support going forward.

This is a game changer for local development tools.

The final bit is a new `docker` client, version 1.11.0, which has more smarts about how to find and interact with this Docker server. No more strange environment variables to discover and set in your ~/.bash_profile.

It works the same, but not needing to manage a `docker-machine` or delegate to VirtualBox feels light years better. The alpine-based redis image downloads and starts in less than 5 seconds! Click here to see an animation.