
Red Hat CloudForms 3.1 is set to be released to the public by early September. Some industry experts believe that CloudForms 3.1 will coincide with the first day of the upcoming VMworld conference. It’s interesting to note that VMware has also adopted OpenStack as its cloud service of choice while Red Hat has drummed up its own OpenStack based offerings. In fact, many believe that by providing tools such as CloudForms 3.1, Red Hat can get a leg up in their quest for OpenStack supremacy.
What is CloudForms 3.1?
CloudForms is Red Hat’s solution for managing multiple virtualization and cloud suites. Although OpenStack is what the software is primarily used for, the platform also allows you to integrate other types of clouds such as AWS, VMware, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM).
ZDNet summed-up the new release by mentioning that new features would be incorporated into each of the different types of clouds being managed. For example, the Amazon Web Services plug-in for CloudForms 3.1 will allow users to setup Virtual Private Cloud, Elastic Load Balancing, Administer S3 Storage and manager Relational Database Services. The VMware vSphere plugin features increased security. The OpenStack module allows your cloud to discover OpenStack items without an agent. You can discover block storage, object storage as well as integrate with OpenStack identity services. The Microsoft System Center module gives you detailed analysis that you would typically find in the Configuration Manager Console. The RHEV portion of the software allows administrators to execute cloud-init which is a way to let administrators deploy packages or services automatically.
If you are a Red Hat client, you will be able to access CloudForms 3.1 in early September. If you are not a Red Hat client, you should visit the Red Hat website in order to learn more information about this product.