Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has added support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as it ramps up a programme to offer customers a greater choice of operating systems (OSs).
RHEL is now certified on OCI’s VMs -- one to 80 CPU cores in single CPU increments, and from 1GB memory per CPU up to a total of 1024 GB, depending on the processor.
RHEL is also supported on instances running on AMD, Intel and Arm processors.
"Planning work has begun for RHEL to be certified on OCI’s bare-metal servers, which can provide greater isolation and performance comparable to on-premises environments" Red Hat said.
OCI now supports RHEL, Oracle Linux, Microsoft Windows Server, Ubuntu Server, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux, CentOS, Oracle Solaris, and FreeBSD.
The move comes after Gartner singled out OCI in its most recent Magic Quadrant report for having improved its OCI cloud offering (it is now recognised as a “visionary” in the 2022 Gartner cloud report rather than a “niche player”) saying that Oracle is “out-innovating the market with respect to emerging enterprise needs such as sovereign cloud” and “building compelling multicloud offerings leveraging its heritage in mission-critical database and data warehousing technology”.
Clay Magouyrk, EVP, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, said in a press release: "A significant number of customers rely on both Red Hat and OCI to run their operations and require more choice for distributed cloud deployments than ever before. Starting today, customers can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI and receive full support for these certified configurations from both Red Hat and Oracle. Deepening our collaboration in the future will see us support additional products and workloads on OCI so customers have more flexibility."
The decision was welcomed by Accenture, IBM, and Kyndryl among other OCI partners, with David Wood, global strategy lead, Accenture Cloud First noting that "a hybrid and multicloud mindset is becoming the new normal. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, our clients can now migrate newer applications to OCI without changing the underlying environment, helping to accelerate transformation initiatives, and ultimately realize value faster.”
