Technology & IT | Tuesday 21 May, 2019 1:00 am |

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.
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. Red Hat’s mutual customers
demanded that they get 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. VMware
is working closely with Red Hat to deliver a simplified experience in the coming months.