Chapter 1. Introduction

1.1. What is Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is an offering that combines multiple Red Hat products optimized to work together. It is the all-in-one offering that provides virtualization, private cloud, public-cloud interoperability, storage, and a common management framework. This guide gives a high level overview of how the product works.

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure entitles users to deploy the following products:

  • QuickStart Cloud Installer (Red Hat Satellite)
  • Red Hat Virtualization
  • Red Hat OpenStack Platform with Red Hat Ceph Storage
  • Red Hat CloudForms

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure makes it possible for you to build your own open private hybrid cloud.

Open means that Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure can make use of new open source technologies as they become available.

Private means that Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure makes it possible for you to secure your critical data within infrastructure that you own and control.

Hybrid means that Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure can integrate with cloud technologies that you are already using, or that you might use in the future. These include Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat OpenStack Platform. It also means that you can direct a portion of your workload to public cloud providers, such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure.

1.2. What Can Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure Manage

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is suitable for managing the following:

Virtual Machines

  • A few virtual machines.
  • A few thousand virtual machines.

Storage

  • Hard disks.
  • Huge storage arrays.

Hypervisors

  • A single hypervisor.
  • Hundreds of hypervisors.

Network

  • One flat network.
  • Multiple physical and virtual networks.

Data Centers

  • A local data center.
  • All data centers around the world.

Applications

  • Develop applications.

1.3. Key Features

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure is a solution that allows you to have a cloud infrastructure with Red Hat OpenStack Platform or Red Hat Virtualization, various storage options including Red Hat Ceph Storage with Red Hat OpenStack Platform, a common management framework for cloud providers with Red Hat CloudForms, and a common management framework for lifecycle, provisioning, configuration updates, and subscriptions with Red Hat Satellite.

Some of the key features of Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure are as follows:

Private Cloud Infrastructure (Red Hat OpenStack Platform & Red Hat Virtualization)

  • Red Hat OpenStack Platform provides a highly scalable foundation to create and manage a secure private or public cloud.
  • Red Hat Virtualization allows abstraction of hardware allowing for greater utilization of compute pool capacity.

Unified Management (Red Hat CloudForms & Red Hat Satellite)

  • Operations management scans and discovers existing resources and their relationships across multiple infrastructure providers. It continuously monitors these resources and scans for new ones, providing visibility into operations across the entire environment.
  • Lifecycle Management manages deployment, configuration, updates, patches, and subscriptions from a single console.
  • Self-service starts with a self-service catalog, and extends to cover the complete lifecycle, operational, and financial management of the deployed services.
  • Infrastructure monitoring and risk analysis collects the infrastructure analytics, enabling you to quickly and proactively manage technical risks before they impact operations.

Interoperability

  • Open APIs allow enterprises to replace or enhance existing functionality with a long list of Red Hat and certified software options. This allows you to leverage existing software as part of their private cloud.
  • Cloud Deployment Planner is an interactive, web-based tool that enables you to quickly determine feature compatibility across multiple products prior to installing or upgrading. See Section 2.2, “Supportability Matrix” for more information.