Lenovo has announced a partnership with VMware which looks very similar to the deal the virtualization company had with IBM, before the Big Blue sold its x86 server business to the Chinese competitor.

The two companies will work on software and hardware integration, and occasionally join their marketing efforts.

“By leveraging the strengths and respective geographic reach of our teams, we see significant synergy in delivering end-to-end designed-for-cloud infrastructures to our customers and their service providers,” said Adalio Sanchez, SVP of the enterprise systems group at Lenovo.

New best friends
Following the US$2.1 billion IBM deal, Lenovo has become the third largest x86 server manufacturer in the world. Among other things, it acquired IBM's System X hardware, which was used by VMware as a development platform for the past 16 years.

Working with IBM resulted in a number of virtualization innovations, including VMware’s first embedded hypervisor.

This week, Lenovo and VMware announced a broad collaboration in delivering IT infrastructure for the private and hybrid cloud. This applies not just to the System X product line, but the whole Lenovo x86 server range.

Under the terms of the partnership, Lenovo will integrate its server and networking hardware with the VMware vRealize management suite. The exFlash storage technology developed by IBM will retain its compatibility with VMware Horizon.

Lenovo will also deliver flexible network virtualization gateway and integrated traffic management solutions based on VMware NSX, and software-defined storage based on VMware VirtualSAN.

The two companies said they will cooperate on marketing and sales, but offered no no details on how exactly this would work.