Red Hat IT runs OpenShift Container Platform on Red Hat Virtualization and Ansible

Red Hat IT makes extensive use of our own product offerings to effectively manage and to scale our large IT infrastructure. Red Hat Virtualization plays a key role in Red Hat’s overall IT infrastructure, as mentioned in a recent blog by the head of our IT Platform Operations team, Anderson Silva: Red Hat Keeps the Lights on with Red Hat Virtualization

I would like to expand on our use of Red Hat Virtualization and outline how we run our IT Managed Platform as a Service (PaaS) environment on top of Red Hat Virtualization using OpenShift Container Platform in our product data centers. Red Hat has been using OpenShift for many years, and has used the latest OpenShift Container Platform technology to leapfrog our environment in several ways including:

• Running OpenShift Container Platform (OSCP) on Red Hat Virtualization across our primary and secondary clusters in our main production data centers
• Launching our replicated identical disaster recovery (DR) deployment running on a single cluster at our DR data center location
• Provisioning VMs using our standard deployment process with Satellite 6, Puppet and Ansible
• Using Red Hat Virtualization features that ensure resiliency and performance such as:
  • Anti-affinity groups to safeguard OpenShift Container Platform (OSCP) nodes that are deployed across the hypervisors to reduce the risk of hypervisors being the single point of failure
  • Quota management to ensure OSCP doesn’t use up all hardware resources
• Deploying NetApp as the backend storage, with ongoing integration plans with Red Hat Storage Gluster
• Automating OSCP deployment with Ansible with prereq/postreq actions for OSCP
  • https://github.com/openshift/openshift-ansible/
• Prototyping and speeding up VM deployment using the Red Hat Virtualization Manager Ansible module
  • https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/rhevm_module.html
• Managing image lifecycle process via Jenkins and deploying across our pre-production and production environments onto OSCP
• Investigating our usage of Source-to-Image (S2I) build capabilities for a future release

OSCP on Red Hat Virtualization has enabled us to add new capabilities to our continuous integration/continuous deployment CI/CD toolbox. We have increased the cycle times and agility of our app teams. The application teams love the additional control and flexibility, not to mention the automation opportunities. The IT Platform Operations team take pride in the fact that we’re running the above deployment on our existing, tried and tested Red Hat Virtualization infrastructure; so we know it’s rock solid.

We’ve only scratched the surface on what we can do with OSCP and with our Ansible Red Hat Virtualization automation and we’re looking forward to doing more with the platform. We are planning to expand our deployments into other data center sites and 3rd party cloud providers as part of our larger hybrid data center strategy. Please visit the following links to learn about the latest upstream development for managing floating disks, authentication, and managing virtual machines for Red Hat Virtualization. These updates will allow administrators to manage the infrastructure with a detailed playbook library.

To experience how your organization can scale on Red Hat Virtualization, please download our free and fully supported 60-day trial today. You can also download a free trial of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform here.