Red Hat Updates Its OpenStack IaaS Management Tools

Red Hat continues to work on its cloud portfolio by updating several of its infrastructure as a service (IaaS) products used to operate and manage private and hybrid clouds. The announcements on Wednesday include the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) version 3.3 andRed Hat Cloud Infrastructure (RHCI) 4.0.

According to Red Hat, its RHEV 3.3 application is the on-ramp to OpenStack while RHCI 4.0, based on OpenStack, is the on-ramp to take the enterprise to a scalable, public cloud-like infrastructure.

RHEV is built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and supports Linux and Microsoft Windows workloads. RHEV allows users to virtualize both servers and desktops. In Red Hat's latest release, to reduce hardware, RHEV manager can now be deployed as a virtual machine on the host. RHEV also includes a backup infrastructure with an API that third party software vendors can use to backup and restore their virtual machines.

RHEV now provides support for OpenStack Glance, a feature that will allow users to store and retrieve virtual machine templates. This version also includes support for OpenStack Neutron which provides advanced networking capabilities including support for application services from third party vendors to dynamically request and configure virtual networks.

Red Hat also continues to have support from HP, NetApp, and Symantec for Red Hat's plug-in that third parties could use to integrate new features directly into the RHEV management user interface.

"Red Hat's consistent improvements to the open KVM hypervisor and its concurrent virtualization management offerings now allow more customers to take control of their datacenters and build individualized paths to a private cloud infrastructure. With new additions to the third-party plug-ins offered by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3, it offers a fundamental core for Red Hat’s OpenStack-powered cloud offerings," said Radhesh Balakrishnan, general manager, Virtualization and OpenStack, Red Hat.

The update to RHCI 4.0 seemed less about adding new features than it was about synergy and building a "tighter integration between its virtualization, cloud and platform components, enabling users to reduce image inconsistencies and duplications by only creating a single set of virtual images," according to the press release. One new inclusion into the mix was the Red Hat CloudForms tool to help manage private and public cloud environments by automating workload life-cycle processes. 

Both the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3 and the Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 are available immediately to existing customers. 

OpenStack Cloud Software is open source and is the foundation for Red Hat's cloud strategy. Red Hat is currently one of the top contributors to the OpenStack project.