Virtualization technology vendor VMware has agreed to acquire parts of its partner and majority stakeholder EMC's Ionix business. The two companies have reached a definitive agreement whereby VMware will pay up to $200 million for all technology, intellectual property and engineering, marketing, sales and support teams associated with four Ionix IT management products.

The EMC products will be further integrated with VMware's vCenter product family. vCenter is a management platform for virtualized environments. The Ionix products involved in the all-cash transaction are FastScale, Application Discovery Manager, Server Configuration Manager and Service Manager.

EMC will retain control of the Ionix brand and have full reseller rights for all of the products listed. While EMC and the two vendors' channel partners have sold both VMware and EMC products together, this deal marks the first time VMware will be able to act as a reseller for Ionix products, according to EMC Ionix Senior Director of Marketing Bob Quillin.

"VMware has not resold any of our products until this new relationship," he said.

Quillin explained that the main thrust behind the deal was separation of technology areas within the common full private-cloud infrastructure each of the companies focuses on. The deal will enable EMC to focus on storage infrastructure management, "while VMware is focused on the application and server level."

Key part of EMC's "acceleration strategy" for private cloud deployment is Vblock, a full-stack virtualized environment the two companies plan to provide together with Cisco, consisting of Cisco servers and network gear (Unified Computing System), EMC storage solutions and VMware virtualization technology.