Red Hat delivers enterprise-grade Cloud Management for OpenStack

CloudForms already provided essential enterprise-level management and automation capabilities for various infrastructure platforms, such as VMware vSphere, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Amazon AWS. CloudForms 3.0 expands support of these features to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, providing cloud administrators and operators with both new capabilities for managing OpenStack as well as the ability to integrate OpenStack into existing environments through unified management. CloudForms 3.0 also expands its support for AWS, enabling users to seamlessly manage workloads running in public clouds together with workloads in their private clouds. With CloudForms 3.0, organizations now have greater choice and flexibility in building both their private and hybrid clouds.

"OpenStack-based cloud management solutions are increasingly viewed by Gartner clients as a means to mitigate risk of lock-in and expand vendor choice in private and hybrid cloud deployments," according to Gartner in its “2014 Planning Guide for Private Cloud, Data Center Modernization and Desktop Transformation,” report published Oct. 13, 2013.

CloudForms installs as a virtual appliance, enabling users to centrally manage and automate workload lifecycles through self-service provisioning and IT process workflows, assess capacity and utilization, enforce quotas, intelligent workload placement, and orchestrate post-provisioning operations. CloudForms’ unique Adaptive Management Platform™ anchors powerful features to automate OpenStack and other cloud infrastructure platforms, including:
ñ Seamless Self-service Portals that provide users with role-delegated, automated self-provisioning of catalog-driven IT services, with requisite request approvals and integration with enterprise service catalogs. Cloud Lifecycle Service Management spans from provisioning to retirement, with automatic aging, tracking and monitoring of services.
ñ Advanced Chargeback, Quotas and Metering, with detailed usage tracking by configurable classifications and support for multiple rates tables (fixed cost, allocation and usage) and reservation based chargeback.
ñ Continuous Discovery and Insight from automatic, agent-free discovery of OpenStack instances and relationships and capacity and utilization, along with configuration tracking and drift comparison.
ñ Unified Operations Management, offering multi-site federation that provides “single pane of glass” visibility across cloud and virtual infrastructures, including runtime operations, service configuration, utilization, events, timelines, reports and customizable dashboard mash-ups.
CloudForms: Hybrid Cloud Management
Enterprises looking for ways to flexibly extend datacenter capacity and achieve greater efficiencies and cost savings are, in many cases, moving workloads to public clouds such as AWS. With CloudForms 3.0, enterprise users can now seamlessly view, request and deploy workloads in AWS from the same management framework they use to manage services in their private cloud and virtual infrastructures. CloudForms leverages AWS’ capabilities for end-to-end lifecycle management of Amazon workloads, including abilities to:
ñ Provision Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) in a policy controlled manner, through enterprise defined self-service portals and service catalogs. State policies are enforced on source AMI’s as well as instance placement into destination regions and availability zones. Identity and group affiliations also condition what can or cannot be provisioned per enterprise regulatory, business and IT rules.
ñ Support Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC), a logically isolated section of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud containing user defined virtual networks. Users can select authorized VPC/subnets to provision and run their workloads, which are managed by CloudForm's policies.
ñ Integrate with Amazon's Identity and Access Management (IAM), which, together with CloudForm's Role Based Access Control (RBAC) and permissions, give enterprises complete control over provisioning and managing Amazon workloads and resources.
ñ Track Amazon workload performance and usage, alerting administrators and users to performance thresholds.
CloudForms is also offered as part of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, a comprehensive offering introduced in June 2013, designed to support organizations on their journey from traditional datacenter virtualization to OpenStack-powered clouds. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure combines Red Hat CloudForms, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform for comprehensive open hybrid cloud enablement.