Not that there could be much doubt about it but with the release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 4.0, Red Hat is showing that it's deadly serious about being a major OpenStack cloud player.

Red Hat claims that its "enterprise-ready solution combines the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the innovation inherent in Red Hat OpenStack technologies to deliver a scalable and secure foundation for building an open private or public cloud."

This new release of RHEL OpenStack Platform 4.0 comes with Red Hat-hardened OpenStack Havana . Under the hood it has the just released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 and Red Hat's KVM-based Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor.

This platform is designed to be used in both public and private cloud and the open hybrid cloud, which lies between them. Gartner is predicting that by 2017 the hybrid cloud will be the dominant cloud model. This, in turn, means that the hybrid cloud is where most IT dollars will be going by the second half of the 20-teens.

The RHEL OpenStack Platform 4 key features and benefits are:

Full support for Foreman. Foreman is a life cycle management tool for provisioning of both physical and virtual infrastructure resources. Foreman eases the deployment and expansion process through remote physical servers and a graphical user interface that provides a real-time global view of system resources.





Full support for OpenStack Orchestration (Heat). OpenStack Heat provides a template-based orchestration engine to quickly provision a broad range of infrastructure resources, from new compute nodes and application virtual machines, to specifying disk volumes, networks, security groups, and more.





Full support for OpenStack Networking (Neutron). Neutron (previously named Quantum) delivers “networking-as-a-service” (software-defined networking) between interface devices, such as virtual network interface cards (vNICs), which are utilized by other OpenStack infrastructure services.





Full support for OpenStack Telemetry (Ceilometer). Ceilometer collects and stores OpenStack resource metering and usage data. It also provides data query services for use with the enterprise operational support systems (OSS) and billing support systems (BSS) that are commonly deployed by service providers.





Integration with Red Hat CloudForms. CloudForms offers a unified management interface for Red Hat and non-Red Hat datacenter virtualization solutions, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.





Enhanced integration with Red Hat Storage Server. Red Hat Storage Server provides OpenStack Object Storage (Swift), OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder) and OpenStack Image Service (Glance), offering a robust and scalable storage solution for use with Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.

The real key is that all of this is tied together into a neat bow with RHEL. That doesn't mean you can't use RHEL OpenStack with other platforms. Far from it! You can use Red Hat CloudForms 3.0, sold separately, to also manage and deploy RHEL OpenStack workloads, VMware vSphere, and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Enterprise users will also be glad to learn that Red Hat will support RHEL OpenStack 4.0 for an extended enterprise life cycle of 18 months. The community versions of OpenStack are only supported for 6 months. During this 18-month life cycle, Red Hat will offer security and bug fixes, performance enhancements, and the back-porting of some additional features from future releases, providing stability to the production environment that customers have established.

Related Stories: