Cloud adoption has grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years and so have the challenges in managing different cloud providers and the existing virtualized infrastructure. Enterprises end up managing these environments separately, causing management and cost overhead.
In comes Red Hat CloudForms, a unified management platform for both your cloud and virtual infrastructures. Red Hat CloudForms is built using the open source project ManageIQ, and is packed with added capabilities and enterprise benefits that Red Hat provides, such as subscriptions, updates, and support.
Red Hat CloudForms supplements your existing infrastructure—which consists of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and VMware vSphere—with advanced management and automation capabilities, chargeback, life cycle management, control and governance, capacity planning, and optimization. It also supports public cloud infrastructures, such as Amazon EC2.
In this book, we will explore its architecture, components, and feature sets. You will learn how to install and configure Red Hat CloudForms, build a hybrid cloud environment, and use the individual features. By the end, you should have practical knowledge of how to work with Red Hat CloudForms.
Chapter 1, Red Hat CloudForms Internals, highlights some of the challenges faced in managing a hybrid cloud environment, introduces Red Hat CloudForms, and provides information about its architecture, components, and features. They provide a unified management platform.
Chapter 2, Installing Red Hat CloudForms on Red Hat OpenStack, shows you how to deploy CloudForms in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack environment as an instance; perform initial configuration tasks, such as setting the hostname, network parameters, and time zone; set up an internal PostgreSQL database; and start the management engine process.
Chapter 3, Building a Hybrid Cloud Environment Using Red Hat CloudForms, explains how to build a hybrid cloud by adding providers and viewing and editing provider information after adding. We also take a look at provisioning dialogs, which are used to raise a provisioning request.
Chapter 4, Provisioning Instances Using Red Hat CloudForms, outlines the steps to provision an instance into Amazon EC2 and OpenStack from the CloudForms web console. This chapter also introduces service catalogs. These can also be used to provision instances and virtual machines.
Chapter 5, Life Cycle Management Using Red Hat CloudForms, explores one of the key features of Red Hat CloudForms—life cycle management. In this chapter, you learn about the different stages of life cycle management, that is, request, approval, and retirement.
Chapter 6, Automation Using Red Hat CloudForms, talks about the automate model of Red Hat CloudForms, its hierarchy, and creating organization units such as domains, namespaces, classes, and instances. Here, you also learn how to create and invoke methods in automation.
Chapter 7, Managing Red Hat CloudForms, shows you how to control and govern the installation of Red Hat CloudForms and the hybrid cloud infrastructure using policies. We cover different types of policies and see how to take automated actions based on events and conditions.
Chapter 8, Monitoring a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Using Red Hat CloudForms, highlights the Insight feature set of Red Hat CloudForms. In this chapter, you learn how to view information about the hybrid cloud using the cloud intelligence dashboard, work with reports, collect usage metrics from virtual machines, use chargeback for billing and metering, and use alerts and the SmartState analysis.
Chapter 9, Optimizing Using Red Hat CloudForms, covers another key feature of Red Hat CloudForms, which is the optimization of the hybrid cloud. This chapter focuses on how to perform capacity planning of the virtual infrastructure by collecting and analyzing capacity and utilization data, creating charts of the data, and viewing the utilization trends.
Chapter 10, APIs for Red Hat CloudForms, introduces the two supported APIs in Red Hat CloudForms, that is, the REST API and the SOAP API.
To be able to perform the steps in this book, you will need access to the Red Hat CloudForms Management Engine OpenStack Virtual Appliance, which can be downloaded from https://access.redhat.com/ if you have a subscription. Although the examples in this book use the OpenStack version of the CloudForms Management Engine Appliance, other versions, such as the ones available for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and VMware vSphere, can also be used to install Red Hat CloudForms.
Alternatively, you can also use the open source version, called ManageIQ. However, certain features may or may not work. ManageIQ can be downloaded from http://manageiq.org/download/.
You will also, of course, need admin (or root) access to an OpenStack environment or a virtualized environment, such as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or VMware vSphere, to be able to deploy the CloudForms appliance.
Some examples may have additional requirements, such as access to an Amazon Web Services account.
This book is for CIOs and solution architects looking for a unified central management platform for their diverse set of cloud and virtual infrastructures, and cloud or system administrators wanting to learn how to implement and use Red Hat CloudForms in their IT environment. The book is also good for reference if you have already deployed Red Hat CloudForms or know something about it and wish to enhance your knowledge.
Throughout this book, non-Red Hat technologies such as Amazon EC2 and VMware vSphere have also been used, so some experience or an understanding of these technologies will be great.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code is set as follows:
{
"version" : "1.1",
"template_fields" : {
"guid" : "529ed0d4-3c55-11e5-a8c5-fa163e52df6c"
}Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
# curl --user admin:smartvm -i -X GET -H "Accept: application/json" http://localhost:3000/api/vms/1000000074058
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Provisioning is also a life cycle management step, and hence the option is available under the Lifecycle button."
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