Red Hat, the provider of open source solutions, has announced the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.1, the latest version of its open hybrid cloud management solution. With support for Google Cloud Platform, Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 supports greater choice and flexibility for customers who want to run hybrid cloud workloads on Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services.
Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 also expands the scope of its management capabilities with software-defined networking (SDN), providing a more unified management experience for software-defined data centres. Finally, CloudForms 4.1 makes it easier to automate complex IT processes through integration with Ansible Tower, and provides customers with a simpler, cloud-friendly subscription model.
CloudForms is an advanced open source management platform for physical, virtual, and cloud IT environments, supporting both virtual machines and containers. CloudForms enables IT organizations to offer composable services through a self-service portal, managing the entire lifecycle from provisioning to retirement. Composable services are designed with reuse in mind.
CloudForms additionally facilitates risk management by defining advanced compliance policies that can be enforced in both greenfield and existing environments, and allows operators to optimise unit cost through capacity planning, reporting and financial management features.
Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 introduces several new few features, including:
Support for Google Cloud Platform
Red Hat CloudForms can manage Google Cloud Platform environments including full lifecycle management of provisioned virtual machines, policy enforcement, chargeback and lifecycle management.
Support for SDN
CloudForms 4.1 adds network management for OpenStack Networking (Neutron), AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Developed in collaboration with Nuage Networks, CloudForms’ new SDN capabilities enable users to discover and manage network elements while visualising their relationship to other parts of the infrastructure.
Integration with Ansible Tower by Red Hat
Built-in integration with Ansible Tower makes it simpler for CloudForms customers to provision complex applications and services through custom automation code. CloudForms 4.1 can now access Ansible Tower to run Ansible automation jobs, enabling CloudForms customers to make use of the Ansible automation language. Furthermore, the Ansible Tower integration also allows for easy composition of complex services by combining native CloudForms service catalogue support with Ansible playbooks.
Cloud-friendly subscriptions
Flexible subscriptions are available immediately to all Red Hat CloudForms customers, enabling users to apply one subscription to either physical servers or cloud workloads. The subscription can be transported in either direction, as often as needed during the subscription period. Customers can also use an average of cloud instances under management to determine the number of CloudForms subscriptions they require for their public cloud workloads, helping them to avoid purchasing for peak demand, while new built-in reports can help them understand their actual and average utilisation over time.
Other improvements in Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 include: expanded support for Microsoft Azure, an updated chargeback model, and new capabilities for the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
Joe Fitzgerald, VP, Management, Red Hat said: “We hear constant
customer demands focusing on rapidly advancing their hybrid cloud
strategies and the need for one, consistent management view across their
physical, virtual, and cloud environments. CloudForms offers that, and
we believe CloudForms 4.1 is the industry’s most comprehensive, hybrid
cloud management solution on the market. CloudForms now not only
supports the world's largest public clouds, but also integrates with
Ansible to dramatically simplify automation.”
Sunil
Khandekar, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Nuage Networks from
Nokia said, “CloudForms is gaining significant market traction and, now
that SDN is fully supported as a first-class citizen in the platform, is
a first-class citizen the momentum we expect will only continue. By
integrating Nuage Networks SDN technology with Red Hat’s CloudForms
management system, customers will be able to automate and manage
workloads across hybrid cloud environments while maintaining unified
network policy across the breadth of their applications and assets.”
In The Forrester Wave: Hybrid Cloud Management Solutions, Q1 2016, author Dave Bartoletti states, "The hybrid cloud management solutions market is mature and growing because more developers and infrastructure and operations (I&O)
professionals see it as a way to address the needs of a growing
multi-cloud portfolio. These solutions help developers build cloud apps
faster and more easily while giving I&O pros the governance and
control they need to enforce usage and cost policies."
Red Hat also unveiled the next generation of Red Hat Insights, a software-as-a-service offering which provides prescriptive analytics across users’ hybrid IT infrastructure. The new release includes improvements such as risk assessment and remediation planning capabilities for virtualisation hosts, containers, and OpenStack-based private clouds. When using Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat CloudForms integrated versions, users can take action directly at the point of insight.
Enhancements to Red Hat Insights include:
Container workload analysis
Intelligence for OpenStack private clouds and KVM virtualised environments
Insights Action Planner to identify and assign remediation tasks individually or in groups
Insights Early Access mode: Opt-in visibility into upcoming features
Fitzgerald said, “We are seeing cloud-based service deployments continuing to grow in scale and complexity, as well as increasing adoption of container based-services. This can put pressure on IT organisations to rapidly evolve their operational capabilities. We have expanded the depth and breadth of analytics in Red Hat Insights to support these new environments and services to enable them to reach their business goals. With this latest version of Red Hat Insights, we extend cloud management capabilities to containers and OpenStack based private clouds.”
Interested?
Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 is available for download for customers with a subscription.
Read a complimentary Forrester report on I&O (registration required)
Explore details of the launch for Red Hat Ansible Tower 3 on TechTrade Asia
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