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.
First let’s talk about Remote Session vs Remote Console, they are often confused.
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.
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:
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.
CloudForms 4.5 marks a huge new direction for Cloud Management and Automation, in that CloudForms can now run an Ansible Playbook natively as a Service, Control Action or Control Alert. We also have some other ways like Custom Buttons and REST API.
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.
In this article we will deploy the CloudForms appliance in the Azure cloud. Red Hat provides CloudForms as an appliance. For Microsoft Hyper-V and Azure, Red Hat provides a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) as a dynamic disk. Azure, unfortunately, does not support dynamic disks. In order to import the CloudForms appliance into Azure, we need to convert the appliance VHD to a fixed disk.
Keeping the whole IT team informed about events or actions in your IT infrastructure can be challenging. Many IT teams have turned to team messaging applications, like Slack, to improve internal team communications. CloudForms, with its flexible integration capabilities, can be connected to Slack to notify the team whenever important events happen.
