Red Hat CloudForms can manage a variety of external environments, known as providers and managers. A provider or manager is any system that CloudForms integrates with for the purpose of collecting data and performing operations.

In CloudForms, a provider is an external virtualization, cloud, or containers environment that manages multiple virtual machines or instances residing on multiple hosts. One example is Red Hat Virtualization, a platform that manages multiple hosts and virtual machines.

In CloudForms, a manager is an external management environment that manages more than one type of resource. One example of a manager is OpenStack, which manages infrastucture, cloud, network, and storage resources.

This guide covers working with providers and managers in CloudForms, which include:

For information on working with the resources contained by a provider or manager, see Managing Infrastructure and Inventory.