Open source solutions provider, Red Hat, has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6, featuring updates designed to serve as the foundation for building OpenStack-powered Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds for enterprise businesses with advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform delivers a foundation for a production-ready cloud, integrating Red Hat’s hardened and agile OpenStack technology with the security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 would strengthen Red Hat’s production-ready cloud platform through advancements in both the Linux and OpenStack components.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 is based on the OpenStack Juno release and includes several new features aimed at easing enterprise deployments of OpenStack technology within existing datacenters and capabilities specific to telecommunications providers, including:
- IPv6 support – for both provider and tenant networks, enabling customers to assign IPv6 addresses across physical networks and OpenStack Networking (Neutron) virtual routers in stateless and stateful modes.
- Neutron High Availability – offers an upgraded OpenStack experience with Neutron agents in “active-active” mode for high availability configuration. This availability would improve redundancy for networking, providing service uptime and improving stability for larger-scale production clouds.
- Single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV) networking – supported by a new driver, enables users to execute network switching directly on their hardware, bypassing the hypervisor and virtual switch levels.
- Support for Multi-LDAP backends – and domains, all within a single Identity service node, easing the installation and configuration processes for the platform, as well as long-term daily operations.
- Full support for data processing – moves the Sahara service from tech preview to a fully supported feature that enables big data workloads.
- Deeper Ceph integration – with new capabilities for OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder), including full support for ephemeral volumes backed by the Ceph block device. This enables ‘diskless’ compute nodes and near-instantaneous booting of new virtual machines.
- New tech preview features – highlighting Red Hat’s continued innovation in the OpenStack space with feature debuts of unsupported technology previews, including bare metal provisioning and TripleO deployment and management.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6, engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, is available globally.
“As a long-time partner and the first tier 1 server provider to offer Red Hat Linux on servers, Dell and Red Hat continue to provide our mutual customers value with integrated, jointly engineered OpenStack-based offerings,” said Jim Ganthier, vice president and general manager, Dell Engineered Solutions. “Our combined enterprise experience along with software and hardware leadership has and will continue with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 to provide customers a differentiated approach to OpenStack with a streamlined, stable and certified solution they can depend on for long-term cloud deployments.”
Interoperability
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 would further Red Hat’s commitment to enabling customers to avoid vendor lock-in and achieve interoperability. With continued integrated support for Red Hat CloudForms hybrid management platform, Red Hat recently announced a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform cloud management API and a certification process for third-party cloud management tools, expanding the company’s commitment to open platform development and customer choice.
“Cisco is excited to bring the innovations and enhancements of OpenStack’s tenth release (Juno) to our customers through our collaboration with Red Hat,” said Lew Tucker, vice president and Chief Technology Officer for Cloud, Cisco. “Our joint solution, Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, offers validated designs and reference architectures for deploying Red Hat’s enterprise-ready distribution on Cisco’s complete turnkey solution for compute, networking and storage. The joint solution also includes coordinated support and consulting services from Cisco, to simplify and accelerate OpenStack deployment.”
