Red Hat Drives OpenStack Innovation With New Deployment and Management Advancements

Last month, we published the results of an OpenStack survey of more than 310 global IT decision makers and professionals, commissioned by Red Hat through TechValidate. The majority of respondents (75 percent) from that survey reported plans to use OpenStack for cloud initiatives – strong validation for OpenStack's overall momentum. And, according to the survey, 51 percent of users plan to use management tools that are included with or built into their OpenStack platform, while separately, 53 percent of respondents rated a simplified installation process as of top importance to their deployments. This highlights the premium customers place on the installation and operational management of their OpenStack-based clouds – key areas that Red Hat has focused on to make OpenStack more mission-critical and enterprise-consumable.

Today, we want to share details about just a few of our recent efforts designed to make OpenStack more consumable for enterprise customers, including additional OpenStack installation and operations management innovations and a new services offering. Building on the innovations introduced in the current release, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director is designed to provide an automated installation process, as well as an enhanced day-to-day operational management experience, including bare metal provisioning and infrastructure resource scalability - all key requirements for production cloud deployments.

New Installation Innovations

Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is a uniquely engineered solution combining OpenStack and the underlying Red Hat Enterprise Linux and KVM hypervisor to provide the long-term stability and mission-critical reliability required for enterprise production deployments. Currently in development, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director is designed to serve as the next-generation tool for deployment as well as management of updates and upgrades of the OpenStack infrastructure. The director will combine installer technologies from eNovance (acquired by Red Hat in 2014), Red Hat’s current installation tools, and productization of the core upstream OpenStack management project, TripleO.

In addition to initial infrastructure installation, the new director is expected to provide day-to-day operational management capabilities, such as greater operational visibility into the core components, while providing a means to confirm that resources are consistently deployed and are properly configured for production use. It will confirm this via a Red Hat tool called AHC (Automatic Health Check) to provide deep, per-node health checks. It will also offer improved infrastructure lifecycle management, including live orchestrated system upgrades with rollback capabilities. Live upgrades are scheduled to be supported from version 7.0 and ongoing releases from there, for deployments using Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director. This is a very important feature for enterprise production use, allowing cloud administrators to easily upgrade their OpenStack cloud with minimal downtime.

Additionally, we plan to introduce certified partner extensibility in the director through a new API-driven framework, providing visibility into deployment, management, and orchestration tools, such as Red Hat Ceph Storage and NetApp Storage server configurations. These new director API capabilities are also expected to extend to Red Hat CloudForms 3.2 for improved resource reporting, conditional provisioning, and resource deployment of the “under cloud” (which is essentially a smaller, replicated OpenStack cloud, used to manage and orchestrate the primary, production cloud). We also plan to extend it to Red Hat Satellite for systems management, which will provide entitlement and content management for images and host packages displayed by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director.

Expect to hear more about the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director when Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7, based on the OpenStack community “Kilo” release becomes available later this summer.

New offering: Red Hat Consulting Guided Transition: Cloud Management

We have also expanded our OpenStack consulting and training capabilities, providing customers with new solutions and services, including validated designs; reference architectures; and training, consulting and support for advanced DevOps and agile methodology projects. A new offering, Red Hat Consulting Guided Transition: Cloud Management combines these services to help customers accelerate the rate of adoption and deployment of OpenStack.

The new offering combines established methods and successful use cases captured from across Red Hat's Cloud Innovation Practice, consulting and product teams, and makes them available to customers and partners beginning to build a complex cloud infrastructure environment. These combined leading practices are designed to enable customers and partners to put their OpenStack investments into action with Red Hat to guide them through migration, expansion tasks, management, trouble shooting complexities, and operation of their cloud infrastructure.

We're working hard to build the industry's best OpenStack platform for production deployments, and the voice of our partners and customers spanning multiple verticals is helping to set our pace and direction of innovation. With the ever-increasing adoption of OpenStack, we are excited to help address customer needs around reduced time-to-solution with a truly open approach that enables automated deployment and lifecycle management of the infrastructure, and new service offerings.