Red Hat and Nutanix announced a strategic partnership to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Red Hat OpenShift on Nutanix® Cloud Platform. Here at IIS, we are especially excited about the new comprehensive support options we will be able to offer as a result of this agreement.

Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of scalable open source solutions and the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform. RHEL and OpenShift are the preferred choice for thousands of organizations employing a hybrid-cloud infrastructure.

Nutanix is a pioneer in hybrid and multi-cloud computing and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions. The Nutanix Cloud Platform featuring AHV® hypervisor technology is a resilient and scalable datacenter infrastructure trusted by many large enterprises to run their most demanding workloads. The Nutanix platform is agnostic, offering freedom of choice in hardware, hypervisor, and cloud service provider.

Both companies are industry leaders in their respective spaces, each offering best-in-class solutions. Together, they comprise a simplified full-stack solution for virtualized and cloud-native applications. The agreement between Red Hat and Nutanix includes joint support for mutual customers using RHEL and OpenShift to run tier-1 workloads on Nutanix Cloud Platform based on AOS™ infrastructure and AHV hypervisor, offering a more seamless support experience and faster resolution times for customers.

A Little History

Red Hat offers its own hypervisor, but some customers prefer to run RHEL and OpenShift on hyperconverged infrastructure from Nutanix. In the recent past, customers could run RHEL or OpenShift in a Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure on VMware ESX or Microsoft Hyper-V—the only hypervisors that Red Hat had formally certified and supported. Customers who wanted to run the Red Hat products on any other hypervisors were subject to Red Hat’s 3rd Party Software Support policy. With AHV now recognized as a Red Hat certified hypervisor, it becomes a Tier-1 hypervisor that is backed by joint support from the two companies.

The certification of Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor, AHV, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift offers enterprise customers a simplified full stack Kubernetes solution for their containerized and virtualized cloud-native applications. Moving forward, in addition to Red Hat formally supporting Nutanix AHV as a hypervisor, Nutanix will support OpenShift as the preferred enterprise Kubernetes container platform of choice to run on its platform.

Indeed, there is no change to functionality, code, or capabilities to either the Red Hat or Nutanix products. Rather, this announcement is about simplifying the support experience for customers using joint Red Hat-Nutanix solutions through this strategic alliance. Customers in need of any technical support will benefit from the combined expertise of the Red Hat and Nutanix global support teams working together and will be able to reach out to either team for initial support.

This level of enhanced collaboration is just the beginning. Red Hat and Nutanix have already announced that they are collaborating on the delivery of an IPI installer for OpenShift on the Nutanix Cloud Platform. We at IIS envision even tighter integration between the two companies over time, yielding more seamless solutions focused on automation and content collection, for example, to better drive and manage joint Red Hat and Nutanix solutions as a unified product.

What does this mean for IIS customers and partners?

“Clarity. IIS already possesses the necessary expertise in RHEL and OpenShift. IIS is also a longtime Nutanix partner with deep experience in the Nutanix Cloud Platform, including Nutanix AOS and AHV. Now, with a strategic support partnership formalized between them, IIS can help implement Red Hat on Nutanix and can be the single point of contact for customers seeking greater choices with a unified support option. This agreement allows IIS to offer integrated support to customers seeking an alternative to today’s high-priced hybrid cloud providers.

Contact us at info@iisl.com for a no-obligation assessment to learn how your enterprise can benefit from improved interoperability and support between Red Hat and Nutanix to build, scale, and manage virtual and cloud-native applications on-premises and in the hybrid cloud.

 

Click on the links below for additional information on the Red Hat-Nutanix strategic alliance:

Media Relations: Susan Signet, 877-704-4001, ssignet@iisl.com