Red Hat and Nutanix are cozying up to make it easier for their respective customers to tap into their joint hybrid-cloud focused offerings. The move is predicated on vocal demand from customers and allows both to better target rivals like VMware.

The new link has both vendors giving “preferred” status to the other. Specifically, Nutanix’s Cloud Platform is certified to support Red Hat’s OpenShift and Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platforms. In turn, Red Hat’s OpenShift and RHEL are certified to run on Nutanix’s cloud platform, including its Acropolis Operating System (AOS) and Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV).

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.”

For Nutanix, the deal furthers new CEO Rajiv Ramaswami’s stated goal of simplifying the company’s product offerings in an effort to steal market share from rival – and his former employer – VMware.

“We don’t have the scale and size that some of the other players in the market have,” Ramaswami said during a Nutanix earnings call earlier this year. “And so what that means is that while customers like our product, especially the big ones are not necessarily going to go all in for their entire footprint with us on day one. We’re going to have to work our way in, and then expand one use case at a time. And these use cases can themselves be substantial.”

For Red Hat, the ongoing OpenShift and RHEL expansion of support bolsters its position as the software platform of choice against VMware. While Red Hat does work to provide its halo platforms on top of VMware’s infrastructure, VMware has been aggressively moving up the stack and across cloud platforms with its Kubernetes-based Tanzu efforts. VMware’s efforts are also set to be bolstered by its ongoing spin-off from parent Dell Technologies. This will allow the vendor to create a unified management layer via software across all clouds and hardware infrastructure.