Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7, featuring a new deployment and management tool that simplifies installation, eases day-to-day management tasks, and establishes the underpinnings for orchestrated live system updates and upgrades for subsequent releases.

Based on the OpenStack community “Kilo” release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is a co-engineered solution that starts with the proven and trusted foundation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and integrates with Red Hat’s OpenStack technology to form a production-ready cloud platform. This combination addresses the critical dependencies OpenStack has on Linux and provides a highly scalable, fault-tolerant platform for building private or public clouds. Originally launched in 2013, this new release is Red Hat’s fifth iteration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, which has been successfully deployed worldwide by customers in key verticals including public sector, financial, telecommunications, and education. Version 7 includes several new features aimed at accelerating the adoption of OpenStack including:

  • Simplified deployment and management – Cloud operators now have a simpler means of day-to-day operation management and resource provisioning, using the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director. It offers a simplified and automated cloud installation tool with system-wide health checking for a proper deployment. Additionally it eases daily operational management and resource provisioning for cloud operators, including an automated “ready-state” provisioning of bare-metal resources to simplify the deployment and repurposing of hardware resources on an on-demand basis. Based on the community-driven OpenStack management project TripleO, the new director combines multiple technologies to offer a single powerful tool which also establishes a new framework that can be used for live orchestrated OpenStack and director upgrades for version 7 and subsequent releases.
  • Traditional workloads requiring high availability on OpenStack – Making it easier to migrate traditional, business-critical applications that require high availability to OpenStack, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 introduces compute host node high availability through integrated, automated monitoring and failover services from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This new capability monitors host nodes and includes the ability to automatically evacuate virtual machines from hosts, restarting workloads on alternate, available hosts.
  • Greater security control – Telco customers now have greater granularity and control over network traffic ports at the virtual machine level. This allows customers to maintain a tightened security level over the greater OpenStack cloud, while allowing virtualized network function (VNF) traffic through each virtual machine, as necessary. Version 7 introduces this via the Neutron modular layer 2 (ML2) and Open vSwitch (OVS) port security mechanisms included in the community Kilo release.
  • Network flexibility – New Neutron networking features offer greater flexibility and improved network redundancy. Network operators can benefit from several IPv6 enhancements, including the ability to support direct network routing between tenants and the external gateway. In addition, version 7 expands the high availability for Neutron routers and improves the monitoring and reporting of the router to help network operators maintain uptime.
  • Incremental Backup – Storage administrators can now benefit from faster block storage backups and reduced capacity needs with support for snapshot-based backups. With added support for NFS and POSIX file system types, this significantly reduces the amount of storage and time required, by backing up only the incremental changes since the last full state backup.

Trusted Integration and Ecosystem
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform is backed by one of the largest OpenStack ecosystems, with more than 350 certified partners for OpenStack compute, storage, networking, and independent software vendor (ISV) applications and services. This partner network offers solutions that complement the broad support and compatibility provided in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 introduces expanded integration with certified partners, including support for NetApp Data ONTAP, 7-mode, and E-Series, including initial setup and configuration via the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform director. In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 7 brings integrated setup and installation of Red Hat Ceph Storage 1.3 server and clients. Red Hat Ceph Storage Server subscription entitlements are sold separately from Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform subscriptions.