Mirantis says a new partnership with SUSE will bring Mirantis OpenStack to a wider variety of Linux operating systems — including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which in a sense means crossing enemy lines.

The partnership, announced today at the OpenStack Days: Silicon Valley conference, turns SUSE Linux Enterprise Server into a developer platform for Mirantis OpenStack. Put another way, the companies can assure Mirantis runs well on SUSE's Linux, and Mirantis will now be able to offer and support SUSE as a combined package with OpenStack.

The fun part is that SUSE happens to have an expanded support offering that covers RHEL and CentOS. So Mirantis now claims it can support those operating systems, in addition to SUSE and — in a relationship that has existed for a while — Ubuntu from Canonical.

The drama behind all this is that Mirantis and Red Hat parted ways last year. They used to be partners, and Red Hat even invested in Mirantis early on. But Mirantis, which had been an OpenStack integrator, began offering a full OpenStack distribution, and that put it in competition with Red Hat's own distribution.

Moreover, Red Hat's OpenStack distribution is the only one that's certified to run on RHEL. Red Hat says this is done to preserve the reliability and security of the combined platform.

It's also because supporting other distributions isn't something to be taken lightly, writes Margaret Dawson, Red Hat's senior director of product marketing, in a statement emailed to SDxCentral.

"We cannot technically support other vendors’ Linux/OpenStack distributions. This is not unique to Red Hat, as all OpenStack vendors have integrated and support their own versions of Linux," she writes. "Breaking the OS and OpenStack pieces apart would break our enterprise stability, support, and lifecycle, as well as compromise the ecosystem."

Naturally, she expresses doubts about Mirantis' claims of offering support for RHEL.

"We aren't clear what kind of support Mirantis and SUSE can claim to provide for another company's offerings, but this makes no sense to us, and it would certainly be confusing and potentially dangerous for customers. As with any mission-critical infrastructure, security, consistency, and performance are paramount at the beginning and throughout the lifecycle of the deployment," she writes.