Red Hat  and VMware announced an expanded relationship to support customers and ISVs who are deploying virtualization today. As part of the relationship, Red Hat and VMware are delivering certification and focusing on open, community-based interoperability between Red Hat and VMware solutions.

“Customers care about open interoperability and certification for running joint Red Hat and VMware environments,” said Brian Stevens, CTO at Red Hat. “With this relationship, the two virtualization platforms that Red Hat Enterprise Linux will support are the VMware platform and the Red Hat Integrated Virtualization platform that will be available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The wide adoption of open source is a result of the commitment to interoperability. Support for our joint customers is just one more example of the efficacy of true open source development."

“The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and VMware software has always been a popular solution with customers, and we look forward to collaborating with Red Hat to advance open community-based technologies such as virtual machine disk formats and paravirtualization APIs,” said Brian Byun, vice president of Global Partners and Solutions at VMware. “We are committed to driving support, certification, and interoperability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat Application Stack. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also the first operating system to be certified by VMware as part of the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.”

Red Hat and VMware will accelerate their efforts to drive adoption of open and accessible interoperability points through a community-based development model. By collaborating on key technology issues such as virtual machine disk formats, paravirtualization, and management API's, the companies intend to work within the open source community to create a common, interoperable virtualization model that ISVs and customers can trust - no matter which deployment model they choose.

“For us to broadly deploy Red Hat and VMware environments in production, we need strong interoperability, certifications and support from Red Hat and VMware together,” said Chris McDaniel, Director, Network Operations at Rearden Commerce. “This expanded relationship between Red Hat and VMware will assure that we can make Linux virtualization with Red Hat and VMware a standard component of our environment.”

Red Hat has already certified VMware Infrastructure as both a certified software application and a certified virtual hardware platform for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In addition, all VMware solutions fully support running Red Hat Enterprise Linux inside a virtualized environment. Starting today, the Red Hat Application Stack virtual appliance is certified and available in VMDK format in the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace for both customers and ISVs to evaluate in a pre-production environment. The VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace can be found at http://vam.vmware.com.

Red Hat and VMware plan to jointly deliver channel bundles of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the Red Hat Application Stack paired up with VMware Infrastructure and VMware Server. These bundled solutions are designed to bring together the best of open source and virtual infrastructure in an integrated and jointly supported solution bundle for customers, systems integrators, and channel partners to adopt and leverage.