Open source solutions provider, Red Hat, has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7. The new release would feature a new deployment and management tool that simplifies installation, eases day-to-day management tasks, and establishes the underpinnings for orchestrated live system updates and upgrades for subsequent releases.
Based on the OpenStack community Kilo release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is a co-engineered solution that starts with the foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and integrates with Red Hat’s OpenStack technology to form a production-ready cloud platform. This combination would address the critical dependencies OpenStack has on Linux and provide a highly scalable, fault-tolerant platform for building private or public clouds.
Originally launched in 2013, this new release is Red Hat’s fifth iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which has been deployed worldwide by customers in key verticals including public sector, financial, telecommunications, and education.
Version 7 includes several new features aimed at accelerating the adoption of OpenStack including:
- Simplified deployment and management – The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director would offer a simplified and automated cloud installation tool with system-wide health checking for a proper deployment. Additionally it would ease daily operational management and resource provisioning for cloud operators, including an automated “ready-state” provisioning of bare-metal resources to simplify the deployment and repurposing of hardware resources on an on-demand basis.
- Traditional workloads requiring high availability on OpenStack – Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 introduces compute host node high availability through integrated, automated monitoring and failover services from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This new capability monitors host nodes and includes the ability to automatically evacuate virtual machines from hosts, restarting workloads on alternate, available hosts.
- Greater security control – Telco customers now have greater granularity and control over network traffic ports at the virtual machine level. This would allow customers to maintain a tightened security level over the greater OpenStack cloud, while allowing virtualized network function (VNF) traffic through each virtual machine, as necessary. Version 7 introduces this via the Neutron modular layer 2 (ML2) and Open vSwitch (OVS) port security mechanisms included in the community Kilo release.
Network flexibility – New Neutron networking features would offer greater flexibility and improved network redundancy. Network operators are served with several IPv6 enhancements, including the ability to support direct network routing between tenants and the external gateway. In addition, version 7 would expand the high availability for Neutron routers and improve the monitoring and reporting of the router to help network operators maintain uptime.- Incremental Backup – The new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 release would feature faster block storage backups and reduced capacity needs with support for snapshot-based backups. With added support for NFS and POSIX file system types, this would significantly reduce the amount of storage and time required, by backing up only the incremental changes since the last full state backup.
