Oracle has thrown its weight behind the Mirantis distribution of OpenStack in an apparent snub of its Linux rival Red Hat.

The move could leave Red Hat without any obvious OpenStack support for customers with Oracle workloads.

In May Red Hat announced it will only support its own OpenStack on its Red Hat Linux platform, even though both are intended to be open systems.

Mirantis’ vendor neutral version of OpenStack will now be integrated with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM as the two companies collaborate on enterprise-grade private cloud systems.

The logic of the partnership is to create an open virtual management system that can be optimized for running enterprise and data center workloads, the vendor said.

As part of this collaboration, Mirantis will offer enterprise customers a commercial bundle including subscriptions to Mirantis OpenStack with support for Oracle Linux and Oracle VM.

Mirantis and Oracle will integrate support operations in a bid to provide a consistent service level agreement and a support escalation path for customers.

Orcale’s COO Edward Screven said the company is happy to collaborate with Mirantis on this effort.

“While Oracle ships its own OpenStack distribution with Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, we also want to offer customers choice,” Screven said.

“We are providing the same high quality Linux support to every customer, no matter which OpenStack distribution they choose.”

Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel hailed the partnership as a triumph for the OpenStack community.

“We continue to show more momentum with OpenStack in enterprise deployments,” Ionel said.

In June this year cloud vendors Mirantis and Canonical signed a support agreement aimed at helping data center operators to avoid vendor lock-in when buying IT platforms.

Systems integrator Canonical will support cloud vendor Mirantis’s OpenStack offering on Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux operating system, in addition to offering its own OpenStack offering.

The rationale, say the companies, is to broaden choice and openness for customers without vendor lock-in.