Red Hat announces CloudForms 3.1

CloudForms is Red Hat’s cloud management platform, built from the open source ManageIQ acquired in December 2012 and part of the company’s new open hybrid cloud program that aims to converge private, public and hybrid clouds.

Yesterday Red Hat announced version 3.1 of CloudForms, that will be generally available in September also as a part of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, this new release will introduces the following new capabilities:

  • Amazon Web Services – enhancements include support for Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) as well as service catalog integration for Elastic Load Balancing (ELB), Storage (S3) and Relational Database Service (RDS)
  • Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager – added as a new CloudForms managed platform, with support for discovery, analysis, reporting and operations.
  • OpenStack – enhancements include agent-free discovery and analysis of OpenStack Image Service (Glance) images; inventory and reporting for OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) and OpenStack Object Store (Swift); integration with OpenStack Identity (Keystone) for service discovery and multi-tenancy; enhanced event and alert handling with RabbitMQ and QPID support; capture of additional performance metrics from OpenStack Telemetry (Ceilometer); configuration drift; tracking analysis; policy and governance.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization – support for provisioning enhancements and support for Cloud-init for guest setup and configuration. Administrators often want to do some configuration to deployed virtual instances after booting. CloudForms now leverages Cloud-init through RHEV to let administrators automatically install packages, start services, or manage the deployed instance configuration after boot, before the user accesses it.
  • VMware vSphere – enhanced performance, increased security and optimized network access to configuration information.
  • Upgraded user experience, thanks to an enhanced service catalog, streamlined provisioning dialogs, added import/export functions for dashboard widgets and dialogs, and a set of enhanced UI wizards to speed creation of automation workflows;
  • Enhanced automation enables CloudForms 3.1 users to better streamline their workflow execution, domain automation sequences and priority controls. New version and namespace management for change control is also available to use ManageIQ community content and plugins; and
  • Expanded integration in CloudForms 3.1, introducing a comprehensive set of REST APIs to enable support for integration into other systems management tools and processes, including service provisioning automation, configuration and state information.
  • Increased security ships as a virtual appliance based on SELinux, along with integration supporting federated single sign-on through Red Hat Identity Management.
  • New interoperability with Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) enables OpenShift by Red Hat brokers and nodes to advertise services easily in CloudForms service catalogs.