Container Management with CloudForms

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Jerome Marc, Technical Marketing Manager, Red Hat

Containers have rapidly evolved from being used for development and testing to production. Today, many vendors provide container products supporting enterprise IT production workloads. Red Hat offers OpenShift, an open source container platform based on Kubernetes.

 

The promise of containers includes greater cross-cloud workload portability, better support for microservices and faster business innovation through the ability to support CI/CD methodologies for rapidly launching new functionality. By pairing containers and CI/CD with public/private hybrid cloud infrastructure, enterprise IT teams expect to better match infrastructure spending to workload performance while enabling end user developers self-service and agility.

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Launch Ansible Playbooks from CloudForms REST API (Video)

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Victor Estival Lopez, Red Hat

In this article, we continue the Ansible Series with a new video that shows how we can execute an Ansible playbook from the CloudForms REST API.

In this video, we are using Postman which is a REST API testing framework. Of course you can use any tool you are comfortable with e.g. CURL, Ruby, Python or anything that can execute REST API calls.

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My First Ansible Control Action (Video)

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Victor Estival Lopez, Red Hat

With this short video, we continue our series based on Red Hat Knowledge Base articles exploring how to take advantage of Ansible Automation inside Red Hat CloudForms. This post is a follow-up of our previous My First Ansible Service article.

As a summary, what we do in this video is to create a control policy that checks if the VM CPU or memory size has changed, and if so, resets the size to 1 CPU and 1GB automatically.

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Accessing Guest RDP and SSH via Custom Buttons

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

First let’s talk about Remote Session vs Remote Console, they are often confused.

 

  • Remote Session – Provides the user a server session on the remote host. Multiple sessions can be established with same or different credentials.
  • Remote Console (Also known as Remote Control) – Provides the actual console screen to the user, still a session but the systems local session. Only one console session can exist. Any credentials with rights to log on locally can obtain the system session. (Default in Windows is Deny)

 

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Review and Future Directions of CloudForms State-Machines

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John Hardy, Senior Principal Product Manager, Red Hat

This article seeks to explain the use of State Machines in Red Hat CloudForms for the use in the flow control of automation.

The topic of State Machines is sometimes perceived as rocket science, barely used but often taught. The first thing to dispel is the complexity in state machines, then we can compare how a state machine differs from other process automation like Workflows.

Finally the article is to dispel the myth that State Machines are RUBY or if you use Ansible Automation Inside you do not need state machines, again not a true statement.

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My First Ansible Service (Video)

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Victor Estival Lopez, Red Hat

With this short video, we start a series based on Red Hat Knowledge Base articles exploring how to take advantage of Ansible automation inside Red Hat CloudForms.

In this first video we show:

  • How to enable Embedded Ansible in CloudForms
  • Set up a new Ansible GitHub repository
  • Create a new Service Catalog and Service Item
  • Provision and retire the new Service

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Announcing General Availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.5

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Jerome Marc, Technical Marketing Manager, Red Hat

Today marks the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.5, as announced in the recent Press Release. One of the key highlights of the release is the introduction of Ansible Automation Inside, which provides a simple, powerful, human readable automation language, directly accessible from within CloudForms.

In addition, several enhancements are added to the multi-cloud management platform, including a new storage provider for Amazon Web Services, metrics and container improvements for OpenShift, and additional features for OpenStack. Let’s take a look at some of these improvements.

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Deploying CloudForms at Scale

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Peter McGowan, Red Hat

One of the challenges of deploying CloudForms to manage a large environment is knowing how to tune it – what knobs to turn and dials to watch for.

Red Hat’s Systems Engineering team have just completed a document entitled “Deploying CloudForms at Scale”. This describes the architectural components that affect large-scale deployment, and details the monitoring, troubleshooting and scaling measures that can be taken to optimally tune each component.

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