Red Hat OpenStack Platform combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server and Kernel-based Virtual Machine for a secure, co-engineered infrastructure—a combination that allows users to run nodes like a public cloud in a private environment. Red Hat OpenStack Platform gives enterprises an open foundation to deploy, scale, and manage a private cloud. It combines Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) into a secure infrastructure—a combination that allows users to run OpenStack nodes (such as compute, storage, and management) like a public cloud, but in a private environment.
Read on this article to learn about Red Hat OpenStack Platform’s features, benefits, and technical requirements.
Content Summary
Product Overview
Features and Benefits
Ongoing Operational Management
Platform Life-Cycle Management
Reliability, Availability and Performance
Security and Compliance
Integrations
Technical Specifications
Product Overview
Red Hat OpenStack Platform brings together open, community-powered innovation with enterprise scale and confidence — empowering businesses to deliver new, differentiated applications and services on a flexible, scalable, and proven OpenStack public or private cloud. Red Hat OpenStack Platform is a proven foundation to help you create, deploy, scale, and manage a reliable public or private OpenStack cloud with security.
OpenStack Technology Leadership From Red Hat
As an open source community project, OpenStack develops and changes quickly.
A top contributor to the OpenStack project since 2011, Red Hat removes risk by providing long-term stability and integrations with enterprise software life-cycle management and production-level support.
Features and Benefits
Red Hat OpenStack Platform gives you the features and functions to construct a scalable, flexible cloud environment based on proven, integrated technologies from the core to the edge.
Ongoing Operational Management
Single life-cycle tool for deployment and management: One tool is used for planning, deploying, and managing an OpenStack environment. Red Hat OpenStack Platform director is embedded in Red Hat OpenStack Platform and is updated to add new capabilities to further simplify Day 0 to Day 2 platform operations.
Workload and infrastructure management: Red Hat CloudForms can manage OpenStack workloads and infrastructure. It gives you resource management and data collection over OpenStack clouds, including resource monitoring and reporting, compliance assurance, chargeback and showback, service cataloging, user management, and heat template management.
Distributed compute nodes: Build an edge computing architecture with distributed compute nodes, placing compute power closer to the data source and providing consistent, centralized management from the core to the edge.
Integration with Red Hat Satellite: Users can access Red Hat Satellite for application and operating system (OS) entitlement, including images and host package management displayed by Red Hat OpenStack Platform director.
Containerized OpenStack services: Running OpenStack services in containers lets you manage and scale each service independently. This simplifies deployment, upgrades, rollback, and management to deliver increased control and flexibility.
Deployments using Red Hat Ansible Automation integration with Red Hat OpenStack Platform director: IT operations teams can preview the OpenStack deployment before it goes live, allowing anticipation of potential deployment or upgrade issues. Added visibility during the deployment process enables faster failure identification and debugging, including the ability to repeat and reapply isolated deployment steps if a failure occurs.
Platform Life-Cycle Management
Reliable deployments with live upgrades: Red Hat OpenStack Platform director checks systems throughout the installation process to provide consistent, automated cloud deployment. It features live orchestrated system upgrades and updates, ensuring long-term, production-ready stability with little downtime.
Flexible software life-cycle options: Red Hat provides stable branch releases of Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux that are supported for an enterprise production life cycle beyond the six-month release cycle of the OpenStack community. Customers can choose to standardize for up to five years on certain releases or update every six months to one year.
Simplified long-life upgrades: The fast-forward upgrade feature in Red Hat OpenStack Platform director simplifies the process of in-place upgrading between long-life releases, like Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 and Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13. It reduces the number of reboots required and eliminates the need for additional hardware.
Build your cloud with a modern IT infrastructure
Red Hat Cloud Suite has everything you need to deploy an enterprise cloud, including Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
Organizations seeking the benefits of their cloud environment can tap directly into Red Hat Ceph Storage, tightly integrated scale-out storage for OpenStack.
Reliability, Availability and Performance
Production testing and hardening: An extensive patching, bug-fixing, testing, and certification process ensures broad compatibility and performance with upstream community releases.
Highly available infrastructure: Red Hat OpenStack Platform maintains high availability and policy-driven measures, including infrastructure failure recognition, automated host node evacuation, and downed node fencing. It also automatically restarts workloads on remaining available hosts.
Performance: Red Hat Virtualization Hypervisor provides superior performance for OpenStack workloads. Based on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), the hypervisor holds top performance scores on the SPECvirt_sc2013benchmark. In Red Hat OpenStack Platform 13, the real-time KVM compute role delivers ultra-low latency using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux real-time kernel.
Security and Compliance
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS: Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) military-grade security technologies prevent intrusions and protect data when running in public or private OpenStack clouds.
Stack access and monitoring: Continuous monitoring and flagging of noncompliant virtual machines ensure resources comply with enterprise policies. Granular role-based access control (RBAC) and tenant synchronization let you manage user permissions.
Encryption and key management: Encryption of all control flows and optional encryption of all datastores and flows enhance privacy and data integrity. Centralized certificate and key management ensure applicability of the best security management practices.
Compliance certifications: Certifications with the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP), European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information (ANSSI) regulations help you keep your environment compliant.
Red Hat Training and Certification
Get your IT team trained on OpenStack and certified with Red Hat’s lab-intensive courses and performance-based exams.
Professional Consulting Services
Red Hat offers a portfolio of consulting offerings for cloud technology solutions, including:
- Consulting discovery sessions.
- Consulting assessments.
Integrations
Containerized, cloud-native workload support: Integration between Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift lets you create a flexible architecture for containerized and cloud-native applications managed by Red Hat OpenStack Platform director. This includes the ability to automate the provisioning of bare-metal Red Hat Enterprise Linux resources for Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform, the deployment of production-ready OpenShift Container Platform clusters for high availability, and the director-based scale-out and scale-in of OpenShift Container Platform nodes.
Reliable storage: Integration with Red Hat Ceph Storage provides a highly scalable and redundant object, block, and file storage solution for your OpenStack cloud. Also supported is the ability to attach a volume to multiple hosts and servers simultaneously for clustered enterprise workloads, director-led creation and management of multi-tier storage architecture, optimized volume migration, and Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) tunneling of internal traffic using Ceph.
Networking integration: Red Hat OpenStack Platform includes several features to increase networking performance and flexibility, including Load Balancing-as-a- Service (LBaaS), and Open Virtual Network (OVN).
Expansive ecosystem: Red Hat simplifies integration with existing data center investments through an OpenStack partner certification program across software, hardware, and services vendors, including original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), independent hardware vendors (IHVs), independent software vendors (ISVs), channel partners, system integrators, and cloud service providers (CSPs) and managed service providers (MSPs).
Technical Specifications
Red Hat OpenStack Platform will run on any server platform that is certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The following minimums are required for specific server roles:
Compute Nodes
- 64-bit x86 processor with support for the Intel 64 or AMD64 CPU extensions, and the AMD-V or Intel Virtualization (Intel VT) hardware virtualization extensions enabled (recommended minimum of 4 cores)
- Supports ppc64le on Power 8 or Power 9 systems running the OPAL firmware
- A minimum of 6GB of RAM (additional RAM may be required based on the amount of memory the user intends to make available to virtual machine instances)
- A minimum of 40GB of available disk space (1TB is recommended)
- 2 x 1Gbps network interface cards (at least 2 network interface cards are recommended for production environments)
- Each compute node requires intelligent platform management interface (IPMI) on server’s motherboard
Controller Nodes
- 64-bit x86 processor with support for the Intel 64 or AMD64 CPU extensions
- Supports ppc64le on Power 8 or Power 9 systems running the OPAL firmware
- A minimum of 32GB of RAM (64GB is recommended for optimal performance)
- A minimum of 40GB of available disk space
- 2 x 1Gbps network interface cards
Red Hat OpenStack Platform Director
- 8-core 64-bit x86 processor with support for the Intel 64 or AMD64 CPU extensions
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the host operating system
- A minimum of 16GB of RAM
- A minimum of 100GB of available disk space (10GB of free space is needed before attempting an overcloud deployment or update)
- A minimum of 2 x 1Gbps network interface cards (10Gbps is recommended for provisioning network traffic, especially if provisioning a large number of nodes in overcloud)
Source: Red Hat OpenStack Platform
