Red Hat might be confident of its chances to become the world’s “undisputed” leader in OpenStack, but that hasn’t fazed rivals Canonical or Oracle, who’ve just announced a ‘tag team’ partnership to support each other’s OpenStack distros.

“As we have said in the past, while Oracle provides solutions for OpenStack, Linux, and virtualization, Oracle also wants to help ensure that customers can receive the same world class support when running Oracle Linux on virtually any platform,” Oracle said in a blog post yesterday.

The new partnership means the pair will support each other’s Linux operating systems when installed as a guest OS on the other’s OpenStack distro. Going further, Canonical will also test Oracle Linux as a guest OS in its OpenStack Interoperability Lab, to ensure the software runs smoothly on its Ubuntu clouds.

No doubt this maneauvering is designed to compete with Red Hat, which revealed its plans to graduate to a full-scale enterprise infrastructure supplier on Monday. Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst penned a blog post saying: “The competition is fierce, and companies will have several choices for their cloud needs. But the prize is the chance to establish open source as the default choice of this next era, and to position Red Hat as the provider of choice for enterprises’ entire cloud infrastructure.”

But Red Hat has been criticized for not supporting its OS on other vendor’s OpenStack distributions. While Red Hat insists customers don’t need to run its own version of OpenStack in order to buy support for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the company hasn’t signed off RHEL to work on its rivals distros either.

In fact, Red Hat often stresses customers would be far better off running an all-Red Hat solution. “Red Hat Enterprise Linux and our OpenStack offerings are developed, built, integrated, and supported together to create Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. This requires tight feature and fix alignment between the Kernel, the hypervisor, and OpenStack services,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president of Red Hat, last May.

In contrast, Oracle’s Linux is more or less a like-for-like copy of RHEL, having been built from its source code. So compatible are the two OS’s that it’s even possible to run unmodified binary packages from Oracle on RHEL. The biggest difference it seems, is that Oracle claims to be “committed to supplying interoperability” with Canonical’s OpenStack.

The development is important because it’s believed more than 55 percent of all OpenStack clouds are deployed on Ubuntu Linux. Meanwhile RHEL trails behind its clone, CentOS.

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