Nutanix and IBM-owned Red Hat are working together with cross-certification of products in a partnership that will strengthen their ability to compete with VMware.
The context is the rise of containerised, cloud-native software development alongside running applications in virtual machines. VMware is driving hard to combine the two approaches with its Project Pacific and Tanzu initiatives. Similarly, Nutanix and Red Hat are combining their forces to make VMware work harder for sales.
A partnership announcement from Nutanix CEO and President Rajiv Ramaswami said: “This partnership brings together Red Hat’s industry-leading cloud-native solutions with the simplicity, flexibility and resilience of the Nutanix Cloud Platform. Together, our solutions provide customers with a full stack platform to build, scale, and manage containerised and virtualised cloud native applications in a hybrid multicloud environment.”
Red Hat’s CEO and President, Paul Cormier, provided a quote from the other side of the house: “Our partnership with Nutanix brings a leading hyperconverged offering to the open hybrid cloud, driving greater choice for our joint customers in how they deploy their containerised workloads and backed by a joint support experience.”
The partnership elements include:
- Red Hat OpenShift is the preferred Kubernetes software for the Nutanix Cloud Platform with AHV (Acropolis HyperVisor);
- Red Hat certifies AHV alongside other certified hypervisors, enabling full support for RHEL and OpenShift on the Nutanix Cloud Platform;
- The Nutanix Cloud Platform is the preferred hyperconverged infrastructure choice for RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) and OpenShift;
- A joint engineering roadmap with Nutanix and Red Hat under which there will be aligned product roadmaps and continuous testing of RHEL and OpenShift with AHV to ensure interoperability;
- Joint support — customers will be able to contact either company with support issues and Red Hat and Nutanix will jointly work on support experience for the interoperability of their certified products.
The Nutanix Cloud Platform offering — which includes the Acopolis operating system (AOS) and AHV — gets to work with RHEL and OpenShift, hopefully making it a valued supplier in Red Hat customer shops. Red Hat should become stronger in Nutanix shops through Nutanix’s endorsement of OpenShift.
What it boils down to is Red Hat certifying Nutanix hypervisor software in return for Nutanix endorsing Red Hat’s OpenShift Kubernetes software. Somebody, somewhere, is saying “win-win” — and they are right.
