How drivers and plugins are supported with Red Hat OpenStack Platform

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Overview

Red Hat OpenStack Platform includes components from the OpenStack project, such as drivers or plugins, that enable connectivity to third party products (see the full list in Component, Plug-In, and Driver Support ). Third parties may also decide to distribute their own components to be deployed on Red Hat OpenStack Platform. To better support integration of third party products, Red Hat has established a certification process for ecosystem partners to certify their components with Red Hat OpenStack Platform. Using certified components gives customers a higher-level of confidence in usage as Red Hat and the partner have an established relationship and the software has been certified for combined use.

The vendor that ships the component is the primary point of contact
Support for certified components, such as drivers or plugins, and who to contact for assistance is derived from the vendor that is shipping the component.

  • If Red Hat ships a third-party certified component (e.g. a Mellanox block storage driver included as part of Red Hat OpenStack Platform) and there is an issue with that component, the customer would contact Red Hat for assistance.
  • If a third-party ships a Red Hat OpenStack Platform certified driver and there is a question or issue with that driver, as the third-party is the vendor that shipped that driver that is who the customer would contact for assistance.

Strength of Red Hat Certification Program and Benefit to Customers

Red Hat OpenStack Platform Ecosystem of Certified Software
The strength of the Red Hat certification program is that Red Hat and third-party vendors work closely to ensure that certified components, no matter who is shipping them, are developed and tested collaboratively to ensure customer stability and success. If Red Hat requires subject matter expertise from the component developer for issues, Red Hat will collaborate with the third party vendor via TSANet, the industry-standard multi-vendor support community. In this case, third party vendors will provide their support based on their own Severity/SLA response time. In addition, some Certified Red Hat partners and Red Hat maintain active Engineering relationships that either party can leverage to ensure we make progress on customer issues.

Use of uncertified components

Using an uncertified component does not invalidate support for the entire Red Hat OpenStack deployment. There may be situations where a customer chooses to deploy an uncertified component. In those instances, Red Hat's general Third-Party Software Support Policy will be used as part of the diagnostic process. Please see the above page for more details, but in summary:

  • If Red Hat believe that the uncertified component is involved in the reported issue Red Hat may request replacing that component as a diagnostic step
  • If removing the uncertified component is not possible, Red Hat may collaborate with another vendor on issue resolution. It is recommended by Red Hat that customers maintain active support agreements with all vendors that are part of a multi-vendor solution.

Red Hat additionally recommends that all vendors that a customer chooses to use are part of TSANet, the industry-standard multi-vendor support community.

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