With this release, Red Hat is one of only two companies that offer a complete package for running a hybrid cloud, said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's cloud business unit. The other company is Microsoft, with its Azure platform.

The announcement was one of a number of cloud-related announcements that the company made during the kickoff of its Red Hat Summit, being held this week in Boston. The company also has added new partners to its Red Hat Certified Cloud Provider Program. It has released version 2.2 of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) package, and has integrated Cisco's Virtual Network Link (VN-Link) technology within the RHEV package.

The first edition of the Red Hat Cloud Foundations package includes a set of Red Hat programs, a reference architecture, and a number of consulting services and training classes. The Red Hat programs include Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat Network Satellite, RHEV, JBoss and the company's messaging software.

The company also announced that IBM, NTT Communications and Savvis are new partners in the Certified Cloud Provider Program. They join Amazon Web Services, which was the program's first partner in the program, which certifies that users can run Red Hat cloud software in these environments with no additional customization.

The new release of RHEV includes, for the first time, support for virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), said Navin Thadani, who is a senior director for Red Hat's virtualization business. It will use the company's Spice remote rendering technology. A conversion tool to move VMware or Xen virtual machines over to Red Hat's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) format has also been added to RHEV 2.2. Virtual machines on RHEV 2.2 can now use up to 256GB of memory each, up from 64GB in the previous iteration.

Red Hat also took the day to announce a new partnership with Cisco. The two companies have integrated Cisco VN-Link within the RHEV kernel. This integration will allow data center operators to control their virtual servers in the same way they control their physical servers, simplifying management and speeding throughput.