Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5.0 - What's New?

On July 8 Red Hat announced the general availability of the third release of its OpenStack version, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5.0, which is an Enterprise grade platform for building public, private and hybrid clouds.

It is based on the recent Icehouse release of OpenStack and built on the newer Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 which were released recently. This release includes many new features that will provide better availability, security, agility & performance. Let’s see some of these feature highlights.

RHELOSP 5.0 now comes with a 3 year support lifecycle which is a sweet sound for enterprise Customers. This is a great news specially for production deployments as longer support means they can have increased focus on the business rather than the infrastructure. Further Red Hat also assures an easier upgrade path for upcoming OpenStack releases.
Customers can now use their existing VMware infrastructure as OpenStack compute nodes due to improved and better integration of RHELOSP 5.0 with VMware. It also supports the VMware NSX plugin for OpenStack networking and VMDK plugin for Cinder block storage. Further, all this can now be easily managed from Horizon.
RHELOSP 5.0 now offers data processing service codenamed Sahara as a technical preview which makes spinning up and managing hadoop clusters easier and faster.
New Cryptographic security standards for virtual machines using RHEL 7’s ‘para-virtualized random number generator‘ capability’.
Better placement of workloads across cloud resources to provide improved flexibility, performance and lower communications latency.
Improvement to the Neutron plugin architecture will enable customers to use different networking solutions due to improved interoperability.

Now, let’s see what are the new Technology Preview’s available with this release

Cells – provided by nova-cells for dividing computing resources.
Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) plugin for firewall.
OpenStack Sahara for provisioning and management of Hadoop clusters.
A wizard based Installer (built on Foreman) for deploying RHEL OpenStack platform directly on hardware.

With the above enhancements to the RHELOSP 5.0 release and many more in the pipeline, Red Hat is bound to make an impact in the increased adoption of OpenStack specially among the advanced enterprise groups.

If you are interested in reading the detailed release notes, click here.

For those 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.

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