Red Hat and VMware Announce VMware Reference Architecture for OpenShift

As the pioneer in open hybrid cloud, Red Hat has seen the market shift in focus from just modernizing IT to truly creating digital transformation across every industry. As companies create hybrid cloud architectures, it’s important for them to consider several important factors:

• Creating on-demand cloud-like environments in both private and public cloud.

• Create operational consistency across all cloud environments.

• Enable highly automated resources for both operations and development teams.

• Establish security up and down the stack, to address increased threats and attacks.

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For many enterprise companies, their hybrid cloud journey begins by creating that cloud-like experience on-premises. And for a large number of companies, that begins by bringing together the leader in software-defined data center (SDDC) infrastructure, VMware, and the leading Linux platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux. From that foundation, many customers are deploying Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform to help them deploy cloud-native applications with containers and Kubernetes.

As customers get more familiar with agile development models that drive their digital transformation, they begin to look at ways to truly reshape the economics that can accelerate these changes. This means having a greater focus on the operation costs that can take away from funding that can be reapplied to developing new business applications.

Red Hat and VMware have been technology partners for many years, helping companies from around the world building more secure, software-defined infrastructure:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been certified on VMware vSphere for more than a decade.

• Red Hat OpenShift has supported VMware NSX-T networking for almost three years.

• Red Hat OpenShift has supported VMware vSAN for almost a year based on VMware’s Kubernetes contributions.

Now the two companies are extending the relationship, by working together on a reference architecture to bring Red Hat OpenShift to VMware’s SDDC stack in a supported fashion. Until now, mutual customers had to do a lot of custom work to integrate VMware vSphere, NSX-T and vSAN with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This created on-going operational costs that were less than optimal and took away from the new focus on value-creating applications. Our mutual customers demanded that we give them something better.

Red Hat OpenShift on the VMware Software-Defined Data Center Architecture leverages the companies’ work together to simplify how enterprises can gain the benefits of both technology stacks, and accelerate that shift towards more innovation and business differentiation. This reference architecture provides customers with a more secure on-premises environment to run Red Hat OpenShift, and eventually combine that with public cloud deployments of OpenShift to build out their hybrid cloud.

The work to create this reference architecture has been both at the vendor collaboration level as well as within the upstream open source Kubernetes community. VMware has contributed upstream Kubernetes to benefit the community in general as well as to help Kubernetes run well with established VMware infrastructure, and Red Hat is glad to see the focus on helping to drive innovation through open source.

And this is just the first step -- Red Hat OpenShift 4 brings optimized installation capabilities to a variety of infrastructures and for this, the companies are working towards a VMware Validated Design. We are excited that VMware is working closely with Red Hat to deliver a simplified experience there in the coming months.

Learn more about this from the VMware team in their own words on their Office of the CTO Blog, and if you want the latest technical details, then you can also check out the OpenShift blog.