Version 5 of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, designed to serve as the foundation for building OpenStack-powered clouds for advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers, has just gone on general release from the company.
It is specifically implemented to deliver an enterprise-class cloud platform built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, co-engineered and integrated with Red Hat's OpenStack technologies. It offers IT organisations the agility to scale and quickly meet customer demands without compromising on availability, security, or performance.
Version 5 is based on the OpenStack Icehouse release and includes several new features aimed at easing enterprise adoption of OpenStack technology in the existing datacentre and enhancing capabilities to make it a more reliable and dependable cloud platform.
It now comes with a three-year support lifecycle, providing stability and support for enterprise cloud environments. Backed by Red Hat’s award-winning Global Support Services team and the world’s largest certified OpenStack partner ecosystem with more than 250 partners, including joint support relationships with hundreds of certified software, hardware, and services partners, customers can have confidence that they will receive support for their production environments.
It also provides support for integration with VMware infrastructure, encompassing virtualisation, management, networking and storage. Customers may use existing VMware vSphere resources as virtualisation drivers for OpenStack Compute (Nova) nodes, managed in a seamless manner from the OpenStack Dashboard (Horizon).
Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 supports the VMware NSX plugin for OpenStack Networking (Neutron) and the VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) plugin for OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder).
Better placement of workloads can now be achieved across cloud resources. Server groups enable workloads to be spread broadly across the OpenStack cloud for enhanced resiliency of distributed applications, or located proximately for lower communications latency and better performance of complex applications.
There is also improved support for virtual machines, supporting new cryptographic security requirements from the United States and United Kingdom, and improved interoperability of networking stacks. Additionally, Version 5 will offer OpenStack data processing service (Sahara) as a Technology Preview, enabling faster provisioning and easier management of Hadoop clusters on OpenStack.
