Red Hat and Nutanix collaborate to find an escape route from VMware

Red Hat is collaborating with Nutanix to make OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux a fully supported solution on the Nutanix native virtualization platform, AHV. The new agreement provides for Red Hat OpenShift, its Kubernetes distribution, to be the Nutanix “preferred choice” for Kubernetes on Nutanix, and for Nutanix HCI to be fully supported by Red Hat for deploying Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and OpenShift.

The Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV) will now be certified by Red Hat for RHEL and OpenShift. Nutanix and Red Hat said they plan to offer a “more seamless support experience” that will provide quicker resolution of issues for joint customers.

Stefanie Chiras, SVP and GM of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux, explained in an interview with SDxCentral that the certification will allow joint users to pull in Nutanix’s hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) assets into Red Hat’s hybrid-cloud focus.

“We’ve built these skills internally to be able to certify and support, and we will be recommending with confidence that [a customer] can bring that into their open hybrid cloud deployment and we jointly will stand behind that,” Chiras said.

Greg Muscarella, VP of product at Nutanix, concurred, noting that the move provides stability to customers that want to merge the respective offerings.

“We’ve worked together in the past, and certainly customers have used our solutions together,” Muscarella said. “They just want really that warm and fuzzy feeling that comes from having certification and full support between both organizations that gives them that confidence to run their mission critical applications on top of our joint stack.”

Both noted that the deal was not exclusive and that they would also continue to support similar options from other vendors.

On top of the integration, the vendors are pushing an engineering roadmap to stay ahead of customer needs. This includes continuous testing and alignment on future product releases.

Chiras said that the roadmap will feed into easing future integration work.

“We will be looking at other ways to enhance and make sure that experience continues to grow,” Chiras said, adding this will include “a seamless way to do the installation, improve that customer experience of installation on OpenShift.”