Red Hat CloudForms – A Cloud Management Platform for OpenStack & More

OpenStack is great but it is not an Operating System in itself. It is a group of components with a modular architecture that uses an underlying Operating System like Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide cloud capabilities. And although it has components that provide great cloud features, it needs a management platform to provide capabilities like self-service, service catalog, chargeback, workload life-cycle process, integration with public clouds & a change management process to name some of them.

Further most companies today or in the near future will be using a heterogeneous Cloud environment, where the workloads will be distributed across different virtualization & cloud vendors (Private or Hybrid) like AWS, OpenStack, VMware etc. So you need a management platform that can manage all of them together.

Red Hat’s CloudForms

Red Hat’s CloudForms provides this (I won’t say complete but its evolving good & fast) management platform to manage cloud resources across private & hybrid deployments. It also let’s you transform your virtual infrastructure (e.g. VMware) into a private cloud and with release 3.0 it now supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform as well.

For those of you using Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2, CloudForms also let’s you integrate it as an extension of your data center and manage workloads running on AWS from a unified console.

So this means you can now orchestrate and automate much of the behavior of the workloads running on your Red Hat OpenStack implementation.

Let’s see some of its benefits

• Self-service provisioning using policies, roles, quota enforcement and chargeback
• Ensure availability and performance using resource orchestration
• Optimal use of resources using policies
• Workflows for automated provisioning of resources
• Granular control over workloads
• Unified monitoring and management
• Proactive planning using simulation of a what-if scenario
• Capacity planning based on usage, trends & analytics

I will be writing more about it in some of the future blogs. If you liked this post, please share and stay tuned for more articles around OpenStack.

If you are interested in learning more about OpenStack and getting some hands-on, we offer Red Hat OpenStack Administration (CL210) course. If you are interested, click here for more details and to fill out the form. And we will get back to you.

WRITTEN BY Sangram Rath