Gordon Tillmore, Red Hat
Earlier this week, we announced the release of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 5.  Customers can use  this recent release to move towards open hybrid cloud working alongside existing infrastructure investments, and allowing for workload portability from a customer's private cloud to Amazon EC2, or the reverse, if desired.   The product is our Infrastructure-as-a-Service solution providing:

  • a flexible and open solution to build out a centrally managed heterogeneous virtualization environment,
  • a private cloud for traditional workloads based on virtualization technologies, and
  • a massively scalable OpenStack-based cloud for cloud-enabled workloads

Version 5 -an important release for Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure
Version 4 already included three tightly integrated Red Hat technologies: Red Hat CloudForms, an award winning Cloud Management Platform (CMP), Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, a full-featured enterprise virtualization solution, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, our fully supported, enterprise grade OpenStack offering.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux has also been a key ingredient, serving as the basis for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, as well as a guest operating system at the tenant layer. And now, with Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 5, Red Hat is introducing Satellite 6 to it's award winning cloud infrastructure. Satellite 6 is accessible with no extra cost, to help organizations better manage the lifecycle of their cloud infrastructure.

With Red Hat Satellite  customers will have a lifecycle management solution that can significantly simplify and reduce the cost of managing virtual or private cloud infrastructures. Satellite provides systems lifecycle management  from the physical infrastructure itself to tenant workloads.  It can provision, update, and if necessary retire Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform hosts.  It can also deploy and configure Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests as opposed to simply provisioning empty virtual machines.

If you have RPM-based workloads, Satellite can be used to provision a virtual machine or instance containing your application to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, VMware vSphere,  Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, or even Amazon EC2.  The inclusion of Satellite 6 in RHCI gives cloud operators and virtual infrastructure administrators greater control of their hosts and provides greater levels of automation for guest virtual machines and instances for tenants.

Satellite provides a variety of other lifecycle related benefits as well including the ability to work with CloudForms to recognize an out of date machine and automatically patch and update it as well as the ability to manage drift using the Puppet configuration management engine.  It can also be leveraged with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform Installer for faster deployments and controlled updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, and detailed inventory and Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription reporting.

To learn more, we invite you to attend a webinar on November 19 entitled “Building and Managing a Hybrid Cloud with Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure.”  The webcast will feature IDC Senior Analyst Gary Chen and Red Hat Product Manager James Labocki.  You can register for this special event here: https://vts.inxpo.com/Launch/QReg.htm?ShowKey=22424