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Hybrid Cloud Management with Red Hat CloudForms

Chapter 1. Red Hat CloudForms Internals

This chapter highlights some of the challenges faced in managing hybrid cloud environments that contain a mix of private and public clouds and traditional virtualized infrastructure. It then introduces Red Hat CloudForms, its architecture, its components, and features that overcome these challenges.

The following topics are covered in this chapter:

What is a cloud management platform?
Hybrid cloud management challenges
Introducing Red Hat CloudForms
Architecture
Components
Capabilities
Benefits
Supported providers
Types of provisioning
The open source version of Red Hat CloudForms

At the time of writing this book, Red Hat CloudForms 3.1 is the latest version.

Hybrid cloud management challenges

One of the important challenges in running a cloud infrastructure is management. This challenge is compounded if you also have a heterogeneous environment of on-premise virtualized infrastructure. Let's take a look at some of the most common hybrid cloud management challenges companies face in day-to-day operations:

Centralized management: Most companies will already have a virtualized infrastructure and also be using either both private and public clouds or at least one of them. Hence, they will have management tools for each of these infrastructures, for example, a management tool for VMware, another for a public cloud (such as Amazon Web Services), and then maybe a tool for managing a private cloud (such as OpenStack). The challenge is in managing them separately.
Life cycle management: Life cycle management involves automation of tasks such as requesting resources, approval, provisioning, customization, reconfiguration, and finally retiring the resources. A lack of life cycle management capabilities can lead to losing track and continuing to run needless resources, causing management and cost overhead. This results from the need to manage individual silos.
Capacity management: One of the reasons for which companies move to the cloud, especially a hybrid one, is to be able to meet the sudden demand of resources from a public cloud, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS). The challenge is to know when to cross over and provision new resources through automation.
Chargeback: Being able to accurately collect utilization data and charge back a tenant or internal department is another challenge that most companies face. It involves performing a manual process or the use of a vendor-specific tool, which again results in manual aggregation in the case of a heterogeneous environment. Companies face the lack of a unified platform for chargeback.
Governance: With self-service being one of the main reasons for cloud adaptability, governance becomes key to hassle-free, automated commissioning and decommissioning of resources. Also, in the case of a hybrid cloud, the challenge is to make it work seamlessly across environments instead of separate governance policies for virtual and the cloud.
Orchestration: Orchestration templates are vendor-specific and fail to work across providers. The challenge is a platform from where an orchestration template will be able to deploy resources across virtual and cloud environments.
Integration: A diverse IT environment consisting of physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures running in different types of hardware, stack, and platform in different geographical locations makes integration of services difficult.
Security and Compliance: This is a challenge that always figures at the top of the list. Administrators need to ensure that compliance is met when provisioning resources across different types of infrastructures, users do not have more than the required permissions, and resources are provisioned with a set standard or configuration.
Unified analytics: Having a unified view of resources, their consumption across environments, and providers to monitor; viewing trends; checking performance; and forecasting are other challenges that businesses face with a hybrid cloud deployment.
External cloud: Another challenge with hybrid cloud deployments is integration with external or public clouds for workload deployment. In most cases, this is managed separately in a manual way, or it is sometimes scripted, but still it requires a lot of hassles. Presenting external clouds as an extension of your data center or private cloud is still a challenge.

Introducing Red Hat CloudForms

Red Hat CloudForms is a scalable, open, and extensible management platform that provides insight, control, automation, and integration capabilities all under a single pane of glass. It is apt for managing resources distributed across private and hybrid clouds, and also includes support for traditional virtualized environments.

It can help you build a private cloud using existing virtualized infrastructure and deliver self-service infrastructure resources, such as compute, storage, and networking. It provides an advanced virtualization management platform with capabilities such as:

Monitoring and tracking
Capacity management and planning
Resource usage and optimization
Workload life cycle management
Policies to govern access and usage

Red Hat CloudForms can also help you build and manage a hybrid cloud from a unified platform, or just provide enhanced management capabilities to existing private cloud environments built using platforms such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack. Some of these capabilities include:

A self-service portal and catalogs
Controls for managing requests
Quota enforcement and usage
Chargeback and cost allocation
Automated provisioning

It follows an open-hybrid cloud strategy, making it possible to use external technologies such as VMware, Hyper-V, and Amazon Web Services EC2 and run Linux, as well as Windows workloads alike.

The platform provides operational visibility and control across environments in a unified view using capabilities such as:

Dashboards
Reports
Policies
Alerts
Approval workflows

Advantages

Red Hat CloudForms provides a host of advantages that provide a seamless management experience. Some of the highlights are as follows:

An easy-to-deploy management appliance available for different virtualization and cloud platforms
A lightweight web-based interface meant to administer, manage, and operate a private or hybrid cloud
Directory integration support for control and compliance, which supports existing technologies such as Active Directory, IBM Blue Pages and LDAP
A multitenant architecture that's secure and isolated, with each tenant containing its own data and network
It provides secure and compliant management across infrastructure platforms by using policies
Scalability
It ensures high availability through the clustering of hosts and zoning of cloud resources
Load balancing capabilities through clustering
The unified management of resources spread across geographical locations
Support for heterogeneous infrastructure and cloud platforms
Improved automation through services and service catalogs
A better optimization of resources
A single tool to manage it all

Architecture

The architecture of Red Hat CloudForms consists of a host of features that together form the adaptive management platform, which sits on top of the virtualized and cloud infrastructures, providing a unified management experience.

The Red Hat CloudForms architecture; source: http://redhat.com/

The components of Red Hat CloudForms

Red Hat CloudForms consists of the CloudForms Management Engine, which is the primary component. This appliance is provided as a secure, high-performance, and preconfigured virtual machine in different formats for different deployment environments, such as Open Virtualization Format (OVF) for VMware, QCOW2 (QEMU Copy On Write) image for Red Hat OpenStack, and Red Hat Virtual Appliance for RHEV.

In addition to the CloudForms Management Engine, there are some other components that make up the platform:

CloudForms Management Engine Server: This component is part of the CloudForms Management Engine Appliance and provides secure communication between SmartProxy and the virtual management database.
Virtual Management Database: This collects information about the virtual infrastructure and appliance. It is usually part of the CloudForms Management Engine Appliance, but can be deployed on another machine as well.
CloudForms Management Engine Console: This provides the User Interface (UI) required to view, manage, and control the CloudForms Management Engine Appliance. It uses Web 2.0 mash-ups and web service interfaces for communication.
SmartProxy: This component can either be used as part of the CloudForms Management Engine Appliance or be installed separately on an ESX server. It performs actions on behalf of the CloudForms Management Engine Appliance on data stores. The communication between the appliance and SmartProxy takes place over HTTPS.

Capabilities

Red Hat CloudForms provides a lot of capabilities which can be broadly categorized into four different feature sets, that build upon one another to provide seamless, unified management of the hybrid cloud infrastructure:

Insight: The insight feature set includes discovery, monitoring, utilization, performance, reporting, analytics, chargeback, and trending, which give operational visibility of the hybrid cloud environment
Control: The control feature set includes security, compliance, alerting, policy-based resource access, and configuration enforcement, which provides control over the hybrid cloud environment
Automate: This feature set contains IT processes, tasks and events, provisioning, workload management, and orchestration
Integrate: This contains features such as systems management, tools and processes, event consoles, Role-based Administration (RBA), and web services

Benefits

Red Hat CloudForms provides a host of infrastructure management benefits depending on the use case and implementation, some of which include:

Flexibility in managing a heterogeneous environment from a single pane of glass
Lower implementation and acquisition costs
An open-hybrid cloud strategy
A single tool to manage it all
Quicker failover to the cloud
Increased automation compared to vendor-specific tools
Continuous optimization of resources

Description

The increasing adoption of the Cloud has led to enterprises having a heterogeneous IT environment that consists of both private and public cloud infrastructures, and in most cases existing virtualized infrastructures as well. As building and managing such a diverse IT infrastructure is a major challenges, Red Hat CloudForms provides a unified, consistent, and comprehensive management platform. With features like cloud intelligence dashboard, self-service portal, lifecycle management, policy-based governance, quotas, capacity management, monitoring and reporting, Red Hat CloudForms lets you manage your hybrid cloud infrastructure from a single pane of glass. This book will equip you with a hands-on approach on how to build a hybrid cloud environment and then manage, control, and gain operational insights into it. The book starts by showing you how to install and configure Red Hat CloudForms, and add infrastructure and cloud providers to build the hybrid cloud environment. Next, you will learn to provision virtual machines and instances to these platform providers, and manage and control the lifecycle of these resources. You will also get to know about automating provisioning. Moving on, you’ll get to grips with the management of resources using policies, events, conditions, and actions. You’ll also learn to monitor these resources from a single pane of glass. Finally, the book covers viewing capacity and utilization trends to optimize the overall hybrid cloud infrastructure, and also introduces you to supported APIs. By end of the book, you will be able to deploy and use Red Hat CloudForms.

What you will learn

Install and configure Red Hat CloudForms 3.1 in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack platform

Add Amazon EC2 and OpenStack as Cloud providers and adding VMware as an infrastructure provider

Provision an EC2 instance

Manage lifecycle of virtual machines and instances

Create custom domains, namespaces, classes, schemas, instances, and invoke automation workflows

Monitor and gather intelligence information about the Hybrid Cloud environment

Get to know about supported APIs that can be used to integrate thirdparty systems with Red Hat CloudForms

What do you get with Print?

Instant access to your digital eBook copy whilst your Print order is Shipped

Paperback book shipped to your preferred address

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Frequently bought together

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Cookbook

€41.99

Hybrid Cloud Management with Red Hat CloudForms

€32.99

€29.99

Total € 104.97

srinivas sarathy Apr 17, 2016

Easy to read, gets you going with basicsNot so good with the cloudforms architecture itselfLacks examples and case studies

Amazon Verified review

Perry Nally Nov 01, 2015

"Hybrid Cloud Management with Red Hat CloudForms" is a book written for a very niche market. Most people in IT understand managing private or public clouds, but using a specific tool designed to manage both types of clouds systems and track and report on them merged into one is quite an amazing feat. This book does just that. You get a step by step process of how to use Red Hat CloudForm to provision, manage, bill, control and and govern resources across different types of cloud deployments.You'll learn how to install Red Hat CloudForms, build a hybrid environment, provision instances from different cloud providers, understand life cycle management to help setup quotas, and automate your instances. You'll understand how to automate workflows with events, policies, and conditions to create actions. You'll understand how to properly monitor your hybrid infrastructure and setup chargebacks and alerts. Additional, you'll get familiar with how to optimize the entire system and how to use the Red Hat CloudForm API with other systems.It walks you through most things, but could do a better job explaining things a bit more. I had to "google" a few things for more information, but overall this book will get you up and running. If you are using Red Hat CloudForms, or thinking about it, please read this book first.

Kindle Customer Dec 02, 2015

A good book for those using Red Hat's CloudForms.This book is generously illustrated and clearly written. It seems to lack a little in 'overview' material, so it makes a better operations manual than a reference book.The book explains many useful features that cloud operators will find invaluable. It's an easy start to learning cloud management.For CloudForms users, this book will be a good read.

Hybrid Cloud Management with Red Hat CloudForms: Build, manage, and control an open hybrid cloud infrastructure using Red Hat CloudForms

What do you get with Print?

Hybrid Cloud Management with Red Hat CloudForms

Chapter 1. Red Hat CloudForms Internals

What is a cloud management platform?

Hybrid cloud management challenges

Introducing Red Hat CloudForms

Advantages

Architecture

The components of Red Hat CloudForms

Capabilities

Benefits

Supported providers

Infrastructure providers

Cloud providers

Types of provisioning

Virtual machines

Instances

Hosts

The open source version of Red Hat CloudForms

Summary

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