VMware has put $30 million in Puppet Labs, forming a strategic partnership with the young automation company to deliver management solutions for virtualization and the cloud in heterogeneous multi-vendor IT environments.

The investment, structured as a D round, follows VMware's participation in Puppet's $8.5 million C round in late 2011 along with Cisco, Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, True Ventures and Radar Partners.

Altogether Puppet has gotten $45.5 million.

VMware's money will let Puppet accelerate product development, move into new geographies and have the virtualization king peddling its wares. Puppet has great ambitions to be to VMware what VMware was to EMC - the "next big, public IT management vendor for the next 10, 15 years."

According to Ramin Sayar, general manager of virtualization and cloud management at VMware, "Puppet Labs is at the forefront of IT automation, and is a catalyst in the DevOps movement - accelerating service delivery and business agility. This strategic investment and partnership will further accelerate the software-defined data center, and will allow a more extensive automation and orchestration solution across infrastructure and application elements for VMware-based private and public clouds, physical infrastructures, OpenStack and Amazon Web Services."

The pair couldn't help but note that legacy systems management vendors - like BMC, CA, HP and IBM - can't cut it when it comes unlocking the agility and productivity offered by virtualization and the cloud and that Puppet Labs' modern, declarative, model-based approach provides the tools needed to manage at the rate and scale of the cloud.

Puppet Enterprise, Puppet Labs' flagship commercial product, enables system administrators to automatically and dynamically provision, configure and manage virtual machines, taking advantage of the VMware vSphere API.

And customers can use the integration of VMware vFabric Application Director with Puppet Enterprise for dynamically provisioning private cloud services, leveraging the more than 750 ready-to-run application configuration modules available on Puppet Forge, Puppet Labs' online content marketplace.

As part of the strategic partnership, VMware and Puppet Labs will collaborate on additional product integrations, including VMware vCloud Automation Center, vCenter Operations Manager and vCenter Configuration Manager.

Puppet's customers, roughly 90% of which are also VMware customers, include Citrix, eBay, the New York Stock Exchange, Match.com, Oracle/Sun, Shopzilla and Zynga.

Puppet Labs also worked with VMware largest stockholder, EMC, to deliver Razor, its bare metal provisioning solution that's supposed to feels more like cloud provisioning.