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Red Hat OpenStack Platform: Open source cloud infrastructure

July 15, 2020•
Resource type: Datasheet
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Red Hat OpenStack Platform
is a proven foundation to help
you create, deploy, scale, and
manage a reliable public or
private OpenStack cloud
with security.

 

Openstack technology
leadership from Red Hat

As an open source community
project, OpenStack develops
and changes quickly.

 

A top contributor to the
OpenStack project since
2011, Red Hat removes
risk by providing long-term
stability and integrations
with enterprise software
life-cycle management and
production-level support.

Product overview

Red Hat® OpenStack® Platform brings together open, community-powered innovation with enterprise scale and confidence—empowering businesses to deliver new, differentiated applications and services on a flexible, scalable, and proven OpenStack public or private cloud.

Red Hat OpenStack Platform is powered by open, flexible, always-evolving innovation. Where established enterprises and emerging leaders alike can confidently build the cloud they need to accelerate business advantage on their terms.

Features and benefits 

Red Hat OpenStack Platform gives you the features and functions to construct a scalable, flexible cloud environment based on proven, integrated technologies from the core to the edge. OpenStack is ideal for both core and edge computing.

Cloud infrastructure with Red Hat OpenStack Platform provides a proven foundation for today’s critical workloads and a future path to hybrid cloud, the edge, and beyond.

Table 1. Ongoing operational management

Feature Benefit
Single life-cycle tool for deployment and managementOne tool is used for planning, deploying, and managing an OpenStack environment. Red Hat OpenStack Platform director is embedded in Red Hat OpenStack Platform and is updated to add new capabilities to further simplify Day 0 to Day 2 platform operations.
Workload and infrastructure managementRed Hat CloudForms® can manage OpenStack workloads and infrastructure. It gives you resource management and data collection over OpenStack clouds, including resource monitoring and reporting, compliance assurance, chargeback and showback, service cataloging, user management, and heat template management.
Distributed compute nodesBuild an edge computing architecture with distributed compute nodes, placing compute and storage closer to data sources while providing consistent, centralized management from the core to the edge.
Integration with Red Hat SatelliteUsers can access Red Hat Satellite for application and operating system (OS) entitlement, including images and host package management displayed by Red Hat OpenStack Platform director.
Containerized OpenStack servicesRunning OpenStack services in containers lets you manage and scale each service independently. This simplifies deployment, upgrades, rollback, and management to deliver increased control and flexibility.
Deployments using Red Hat Ansible® Automation integration with Red Hat OpenStack Platform directorIT operations teams can preview the OpenStack deployment before it goes live using Red Hat Ansible, allowing anticipation of potential deployment or upgrade issues. Added visibility during the deployment process enables faster failure identification and debugging, including the ability to repeat and reapply isolated deployment steps if a failure occurs.

Build your cloud with a
modern IT infrastructure

Organizations seeking the
benefits of their cloud environ-
ment can tap directly into
Red Hat Ceph Storage, tightly
integrated scale-out storage
for OpenStack. Learn more at
redhat.com/en/resources/
hyperconverged-infrastructure-for-cloud.

 

Red Hat Training
and Certification

Get your IT team trained on
OpenStack and certified with
Red Hat’s lab-intensive courses
and performance-based exams.

Table 2. Platform life-cycle management

FeatureBenefit
Reliable deployments with live upgradesRed Hat OpenStack Platform director checks systems throughout the installation process to provide consistent, automated cloud deployment. It features live orchestrated system upgrades and updates, ensuring longterm, production-ready stability with little downtime.
Flexible software lifecycle optionsRed Hat provides stable branch releases of Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux® that are supported for an enterprise production life cycle beyond the six-month release cycle of the OpenStack community. Customers can choose to standardize for up to five years on certain releases or update every six months to one year.
Simplified long-life upgradesThe fast-forward upgrade feature in Red Hat OpenStack Platform director simplifies the process of in-place upgrading between long-life releases, like Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13. It reduces the number of reboots required and eliminates the need for additional hardware.

Table 3. Reliability, availability, and performance

 Feature Benefit
Production testing
and hardening		An extensive patching, bug-fixing, testing, and certification process ensures broad compatibility and performance with upstream community releases.
Highly available infrastructureRed Hat OpenStack Platform maintains high availability and policy-driven measures, including infrastructure failure recognition, automated host node evacuation, and downed node fencing. It also automatically restarts workloads on remaining available hosts.
PerformanceRed Hat Virtualization hypervisor provides superior performance for OpenStack workloads. Based on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), the hypervisor holds top performance scores on the SPECvirt_ sc2013benchmark. In Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13, the real-time KVM compute role delivers ultra-low latency using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux real-time kernel.
GPU/vGPU Support Promote new innovation and modern customer experiences driven by hardware accelerated applications for emerging workloads like artificial intelligence/machine learning.

Professional
consulting services

Red Hat offers a portfolio of
consulting offerings for cloud
technology solutions, including:

• Consulting discovery sessions
• Consulting assessments

Learn more at
redhat.com/consulting


For more information on
OpenStack, visit openstack.org.


For more information on
Red Hat cloud solutions,
visit redhat.com/products/
cloud-computing.

Table 4. Security and compliance

FeatureBenefit
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OSSecurity-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) military-grade security technologies prevent intrusions and protect data when running in public or private OpenStack clouds.
Stack access and monitoringContinuous monitoring and flagging of noncompliant virtual machines ensure resources comply with enterprise policies. Granular role-based access control (RBAC) and tenant synchronization let you manage user permissions.
Encryption and key management including Hardware Security Module (HSM) back end supportEncryption of control flows and optional encryption of datastores and flows enhance privacy and data integrity. Centralized certificate and key management ensure applicability of the best security management practices to help maintain security and meet strict compliance standards with the support of dedicated key management hardware.
Crypto offload for IPSec VPN to NICSupport a more diverse environment allowing for high bandwidth remote IPsec VPN connections at the VM/tenant level as well as improved compliance with security standards such as GDPR and Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS)
Compliance accelerationSecurity features targeted toward the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information (ANSSI) regulations help you keep your environment compliant.

Table 5. Integrations

FeatureBenefit
Containerized, cloud-native workload supportIntegration between Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift® lets you create a flexible architecture for containerized and cloud-native applications managed by Red Hat OpenStack Platform director. This includes the ability to automate the provisioning of bare-metal Red Hat Enterprise Linux resources for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the deployment of production-ready OpenShift Container Platform clusters for high availability, and the director-based scale-out and scale-in of OpenShift Container Platform nodes.
Reliable storageIntegration with Red Hat Ceph® Storage provides a highly scalable and redundant object, block, and file storage solution for your OpenStack cloud. Also supported is the ability to attach a volume to multiple hosts and servers simultaneously for clustered enterprise workloads, director-led creation and management of multi-tier storage architecture, optimized volume migration, and Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) tunneling of internal traffic using Ceph.
Networking integrationRed Hat OpenStack Platform includes several features to increase networking performance and flexibility, including Load Balancing-as-aService (LBaaS), and Open Virtual Network (OVN).
Expansive ecosystemRed Hat simplifies integration with existing datacenter investments through an OpenStack partner certification program across software, hardware, and services vendors, including original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), independent hardware vendors (IHVs), independent software vendors (ISVs), channel partners, system integrators, and cloud service providers (CSPs) and managed service providers (MSPs).

Technical specifications

Red Hat OpenStack Platform will run on any server platform that is certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The following minimums are required for specific server roles:

Compute nodes

  • 64-bit x86 processor with support for the Intel 64 or AMD64 CPU extensions, and the AMD-V or Intel Virtualization (Intel VT) hardware virtualization extensions enabled (recommended minimum of 4 cores)
  • Supports ppc64le on Power 8 or Power 9 systems running the OPAL firmware
  • A minimum of 6GB of RAM (additional RAM may be required based on the amount of memory the user intends to make available to virtual machine instances)
  • A minimum of 40GB of available disk space (1TB is recommended)
  • 2 x 1Gbps network interface cards (at least 2 network interface cards are recommended for production environments)
  • Each compute node requires intelligent platform management interface (IPMI) on server’s motherboard

Controller nodes

  • 64-bit x86 processor with support for the Intel 64 or AMD64 CPU extensions
  • Supports ppc64le on POWER8 or POWER9 systems running the OPAL firmware
  • A minimum of 32GB of RAM (64GB is recommended for optimal performance)
  • A minimum of 40GB of available disk space
  • 2 x 1Gbps network interface cards

Red Hat Openstack Platform director

  • 8-core 64-bit x86 processor with support for the Intel 64 or AMD64 CPU extensions
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the host operating system
  • A minimum of 16GB of RAM
  • A minimum of 100GB of available disk space (10GB of free space is needed before attempting an overcloud deployment or update)
  • A minimum of 2 x 1Gbps network interface cards (10Gbps is recommended for provisioning network traffic, especially if provisioning a large number of nodes in overcloud)

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