When VMware’s SDDC meets Redhat’s Openshift
Over the last few months I’ve had the opportunity to work on one of the most interesting projects that I think I’ve ever worked on at VMware.
I’m sure it’s no surprise to anyone that VMware provides BY FAR the most used compute, network and storage virtualisation platform globally, and that every FTSE 100, Fortune 500 company uses our technology somewhere. As VMware was coming out of the ‘hypervisor wars’ against the likes of Hyper-V and KVM it was estimated to have between a 75% and 85% market share.
Having said that though, what really matters to customers is what they run on top of that platform, that is what differentiates them and their businesses. With an increasing number of people looking to using Containers for encapsulating workloads many people are choosing to run those Container Platforms on top of their Virtualised Infrastructure platform – I mean it makes sense, Containers solve a developer velocity and productivity challenge (not to mention portability) and the strong encapsulation of VM’s solves a whole range of resource, scheduling and security challenges that IT Operations will face day to day.
Increasingly talking to customers they are expecting the same sort of choice on top of vSphere for those modern container platforms as they expect to have choice of Operating Systems – and more and more of those customers are running Redhat’s Openshift Kubernetes platform … and more and more of them want to run that on their VMware IaaS platform.
All about Redhat and VMware’s mutual customers
It quickly became apparent that there was a real need to set competition aside here and what was needed from both the VMware and Redhat side was a joint focus between the two companies to allow our mutual customers to run Openshift on top of their VMware Cloud Foundation platform, at scale, in a supported architecture and approach.
It was a tough business case to make stack up in internally, after all Redhat’s Openshift platform competes directly with our PKS and Tanzu platforms – but at the same time the reality is that Redhat’s Openshift has a huge head-start in the market, and we had customers asking why it couldn’t just be made simple to run on VMware.
We took a small VMware team to Redhat’s HQ in Raleigh, North Carolina to meet with the Product Management team of Openshift. I can still remember to this day it was a very strange time – most people still saw Redhat and VMware as mortal enemies – one representing all that was good about Open Source and Community, and the other representing ‘Big Corporate Propiertary IT’ – but I was convinced there was good for both customer and community if we could get this right, and challenging the Status Quo was never something I have been shy of.
What we created
What we created was a landmark in collaboration between Redhat and VMware. Not only did we manage to influence the development direction of Redhat to ensure that they were allowing customers to get a BETTER Openshift experience by interacting more tightly with their underlying VMware platform but we also managed to get senior leaders on both the Redhat and VMware sides of the fence to jointly write blogs (about the other) in support of the new joint architecture that we had pulled together thanks to some amazing work on both the Redhat and VMware sides.
And so to today, May 9th 2019 …..
As I sit and write this in a hotel room in Boston ahead of Openshift Commons and the Redhat Summit 2019 I can feel an element of excitement. Today a VMware Employee (one Robbie Jerrom) will stand on stange at Openshift Commons (the community event for Openshift conbributors) and announce that VMware will be supporting their platform for VMware and Redhat’s mutual customers in a 30 min presentation talking through the joint work we have done.
- Chris Wolf, VMware’s CTO will also publish a post on the VMware blog site in support of VMware’s customers who want to run Openshift on their VMware IaaS platform (and that post can be found here) – https://octo.vmware.com/vmware-red-hat-bring-red-hat-openshift-vmware-sddc/
- Ashesh Badani, Redhat’s VP of Product will also publish a blog post explaing why VMware and Redhat are ‘better together’ and how the underlying technology in the VMware SDDC supports Openshift customers to get a better operational and security experience through vSphere and NSX Integration. That post is here https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-openshift-and-vmware-better-together
- Redhat Published a joint blog co-written by Robbie Jerrom at VMware and the Redhat team to go through the engineering work that was done to bring these two worlds together – and that post is here. https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/red-hat-and-vmware-announce-vmware-reference-architecture-openshift
Creating and running this project has been one of the highlights of my career at VMware. I’ve found myself on calls with our CEO Pat Gelsinger and our corporate strategy and comms team pulling this together. I’ve backed our customers 100% and going forwads I believe that the success of the VMware platform is going to be by being seen as the platform on which to run ‘all the things’ – and that includes our competitors products.