Red Hat Enterprise Linux Becomes a Supported OS on Oracle Cloud

Highlights –

• Red Hat is about to become a supported operating system on Oracle infrastructure under the new partnership agreement.
• Now certified configurations of OCI virtual machines can run RHEL, making it easy for customers to shift existing workload to Oracle cloud.

Red Hat Inc. recently announced a nonexclusive partnership with Oracle Corp. which enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux to become a supported operating system on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

The company claims the high significance of the deal as 90% of Fortune 500 Companies currently use products from at least one of the two companies. The company said that standardizing on RHEL will “enable customers to gain a common platform that stretches from their data center to OCI distributed cloud.”

Under the agreement, certified configurations of OCI virtual machines can run RHEL, making it easy for customers to migrate existing workloads to the Oracle Cloud. Bounded with an expanded joint agreement, customers can also get in touch with either vendor for technical support.

Oracle Enterprise Linux will be offered as its default cloud platform by Oracle. Mike Evans, vice president of technical business development at Red Hat, commented, “Should a customer want to move their workloads on OCI from OEL to RHEL, they can use Red Hat’s convert2rhel tool or, optionally, work with Red Hat Consulting to do so.”

Depending on the processor, RHEL has been approved for OCI virtual machines with up to 80 CPU cores in single-CPU increments and memory sizes ranging from 1 gigabyte to 1,024 gigabytes. Throughout this year, Red Hat intends to add a wider variety of configurations, according to Evans.

Executive vice president of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Clay Magouyrk, said in a statement, “Deepening our collaboration in the future will see us support additional products and workloads on OCI so customers have more flexibility.”

Red Hat refused to commit to offering additional products on the Oracle Cloud, but Evans said, “We are exploring many options, including multiple ways to consume RHEL within OCI (as we have done with other hyperscalers), broader instance types as well adding additional Red Hat products. All of this will be decided based on customer demand.”

The company has its own ecosystem, and it can play a role in connecting its partners with Oracle’s, said Stefanie Chiras, senior vice president of Red Hat Partner Ecosystem Success. She said, “Our goal is to be a catalyst to join the partners together to create an ecosystem. It’s not about one company or another’s ecosystem; it’s how they come together.”