CloudForms is an advanced open source management platform for physical, virtual, and cloud IT environments, supporting both virtual machines and containers. CloudForms enables IT organizations to offer composable services through a self-service portal, managing the entire lifecycle from provisioning to retirement. It also facilitates risk management by defining advanced compliance policies that can be enforced in both greenfield and existing environments, and allows operators to optimize unit cost through capacity planning, reporting and financial management features.
Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 introduces several new few features, including:
Support for Google Cloud Platform
Developed in close collaboration with Google in the ManageIQ open source community, customers can now use Red Hat CloudForms to manage Google Cloud Platform environments. The support includes full lifecycle management of provisioned virtual machines, policy enforcement, chargeback and lifecycle management.
Support for software-defined networking
As organizations adopt Red Hat CloudForms to manage their cloud workloads, the management platform must extend beyond compute and handle networking and storage as well. To this end, CloudForms 4.1 adds network management for OpenStack Networking (Neutron), Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. Developed in close collaboration with Nuage Networks, CloudForms’ new SDN capabilities enable users to discover and manage network elements while visualizing their relationship to other parts of the infrastructure.
Integration with Ansible Tower by Red Hat
Built-in integration with Ansible Tower makes it simpler than ever for CloudForms customers to provision complex applications and services through custom automation code. CloudForms 4.1 can now access Ansible Tower to run Ansible automation jobs, enabling CloudForms customers to make use of the popular Ansible automation language. Furthermore, the Ansible Tower integration also allows for easy composition of complex services by combining native CloudForms service catalog support with Ansible playbooks.
New cloud-friendly subscriptions
New flexible subscriptions are available immediately to all Red Hat CloudForms customers, enabling users to apply one subscription to either physical servers or cloud workloads. The subscription can be transported in either direction, as often as needed during the subscription period. Customers can also use an average of cloud instances under management to determine the number of CloudForms subscriptions they require for their public cloud workloads, helping them to avoid purchasing for peak demand, while new built-in reports can help them understand their actual and average utilization over time.
Other improvements in Red Hat CloudForms 4.1 include:
· Expanded support for Microsoft Azure, including a wider range of functionality spanning support for Microsoft Azure cloud images, events, metrics, provisioning from private images, and full lifecycle management. CloudForms 4.1 also brings SmartState Analysis (agentless VM and container introspection) to Microsoft Azure, allowing enterprises to enable DevOps and self-service, and mitigate Shadow IT, through advanced policy and compliance enforcement that was previously only available on premises;
· Updated charge-back model, including customizable currencies and rate tiers;
· New capabilities for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, SmartState Analysis, heatmaps showing operational utilization, support for persistent data volumes; and
· Improved self-service user interface, adding a new shopping cart interface and remote console.
