Today at Red Hat Summit, VMware and Red Hat announced mutual support for OpenShift 3.11 on VMware software-defined data center (SDDC) technologies, along with a mutually hosted reference architecture that details integration of all core VMware SDDC components—VMware vSAN, NSX-T and vSphere—with Red Hat OpenShift. In addition, we also plan to release a VMware Validated Design (VVD) for Red Hat OpenShift 4 on VMware SDDC in the coming months.
VMware has always been about empowering customer choice: choice of hardware servers and traditional applications as the ESX hypervisor became mainstream; choice of networking hardware with VMware NSX; and in today’s hybrid-cloud era, a choice of clouds and consumption interfaces for modern applications. And now, we add a jointly authored reference architecture deployment guide for customers choosing to run Red Hat’s container and application platform—OpenShift—on their VMware SDDC.
Broadening VMware SDDC Support for Kubernetes
VMware sees a fantastic future for Kubernetes—with Kubernetes ultimately becoming the modern application middleware that crosses clouds, data centers, and edge sites. Building apps and services using Kubernetes allows organizations to maintain flexibility for their core business services, while also benefiting from a growing community and massive ecosystem around the project. VMware SDDC brings scalable, resilient infrastructure delivered as-code that tightly integrates not just with our own Kubernetes offerings but also those of key partners such as Red Hat and Google. VMware’s strategy is to empower customers to run any application wherever their business needs demand. Core to that strategy is to enable the operations teams to efficiently support any application, leveraging the globally consistent SDDC infrastructure and operational plane, while at the same time enabling the developer team with a true native developer experience.
With today’s announcement with Red Hat, VMware adds even broader support to the existing comprehensive list of solutions for the Kubernetes developer. We have VMware Enterprise PKS (a turnkey solution pre-engineered into both the VMware SDDC as well as public clouds) or VMware Essential PKS (an open and modular approach).
Building on Long-Standing Interoperability with Red Hat
Today’s news builds on VMware’s and Red Hat’s commitment to interoperability and support which has gone back many years—making sure that Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs well on the VMware vSphere hypervisor and with support between NSX-T and OpenShift. For customers who already have a significant investment in VMware’s SDDC as their digital foundation and Red Hat OpenShift as a container/application platform, the mutually developed reference architecture allows both development teams and IT organizations to get improved value from the investments they have already made.
To that end, we have made it a priority to fully support the application platforms and open source projects that are critical to our customers on VMware SDDC. This philosophy has allowed IT operations to quickly onboard new open source technologies, designing them to be production-grade from the beginning. The bottom line: we continue to work tirelessly to make every open source project, application, and service that matters to you a first-class citizen on VMware SDDC.
We don’t know what tomorrow holds, but rest assured, if it matters to you, it matters to us. Our promise to you is that you can count on VMware SDDC to run whatever you want, wherever you want, all while enabling consistent performance, resiliency, security, telemetry, compliance, and governance.
Don’t stop here. To see the technical details of the Red Hat and VMware reference architecture, take a look at Robbie Jerrom’s blog and this blog post from our colleagues at Red Hat.
