Red Hat beefs up OpenStack and adds 3rdparty plugins

The OpenStack wagon train is now really starting to roll and pick up some speed, with more service providers coming along with implementations of the infrastructure standard. The latest to announce is Red Hat, with Version 3.3 of Enterprise Virtualisation.

This has been designed to deliver traditional datacentre virtualisation while providing an on-ramp to OpenStack, allowing enterprises to deploy both traditional and elastic workloads on their existing infrastructure without impacting service levels, performance or scalability.

The new version enables customers to now deploy a common set of OpenStack services (Compute, Storage and Networking) that can be used by their platform through Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, as well as their private cloud through Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. With a cohesive environment between the private cloud and the datacentre, it becomes possible to deploy traditional and elastic workloads without having to duplicate infrastructure layers.

It includes several enhanced infrastructure, networking and storage features to enhance developer portability across a heterogeneous cloud environment. For example, it has a new self-hosted engine, allowing the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation manager to be deployed as a virtual machine on the host, reducing hardware requirements.

It also provides back-up and restore API integration, which now includes a new backup infrastructure providing a rich API set for third party software vendors to backup and restore their virtual machines, as well as support for OpenStack Glance and OpenStack Neutron, enabling users to store their virtual machine templates and enable advanced networking configurations with a shared infrastructure between private clouds and datacentre virtualisation.

As part of the Version 3.3 announcement, Red Hat has also announced the availability of a series of third party plugins that work with the plug-in framework introduced by the company last June.The first set of fully supported plug-ins to come available include the HP Insight Control Plug-in, which provides actionable insight on underlying HP hardware, the NetApp Virtual Console for the discovery, provisioning, modification and rapid cloning of NetApp NFS, and the Symantec Veritas Cluster Server, which provides automated disaster recovery functionality.  

“Red Hat’s consistent improvements to the open KVM hypervisor and its concurrent virtualisation management offerings now allow more customers to take control of their datacentres and build individualised paths to a private cloud infrastructure,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, , Red Hat’s general manager for Virtualisation and OpenStack. “With new additions to the third-party plug-ins offered by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 3.3, it offers a fundamental core for Red Hat’s OpenStack-powered cloud offerings.”