One of the exciting new features in CloudForms 4.6 within Automate is Embedded Methods. That is, one can store reusable, directly callable, ruby code within Automate and access from other Automate Methods.
Continue reading “Embedded Methods”
Today marks the general availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.6, as announced in the recent Press Release. One of the key highlights of the release is the introduction of Lenovo XClarity as the first physical infrastructure provider, enabling CloudForms to go beyond hybrid cloud management and manage hybrid infrastructure.
Continue reading “Announcing General Availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.6”
Debugging might not be one of your favorite things to do, but when your automation fails it is good to know where to look to find information and troubleshoot. In this blog post, we investigate how to make sure Ansible Automation is correctly configured inside CloudForms, and how to troubleshoot issues that might occur when running Ansible Automation. Content for this blog post is based on the knowledge base article published on Red Hat Customer Portal.
Continue reading “Debugging Ansible Automation inside Red Hat CloudForms”
Few days ago one of our fellows, Christian Jung, published a very good article explaining best practices while coding Ruby code inside Red Hat CloudForms.
Continue reading “Best Practice Recommendations for Automate”
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.
Continue reading “Review and Future Directions of CloudForms State-Machines”
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.
Continue reading “Announcing General Availability of Red Hat CloudForms 4.5”
I spent the last decade working with virtualization platforms and the certifications and accreditation’s that go along with them. During this time, I thought I understood what it meant to run an efficient data center. After six months of working with Red Hat CloudForms, a Cloud Management Platform (CMP), I now wonder what was I thinking. I encountered every one of the problems below, each are preventable with the right solution. Remember, we live in the 21st century–shouldn’t the software that we use act like it?
Continue reading “Ten Ways a Cloud Management Platform Makes your Virtualization Life Easier”
In this post, we speak with Peter McGowan, author of Mastering CloudForms Automation, to find out about his interest in CloudForms automation and the process behind bringing his book to reality. You can download an electronic copy of the book from the Red Hat Customer Portal.
Continue reading “Creating “Mastering CloudForms Automation””
To recuperate costs from running a cloud infrastructure, IT organizations often need to charge users for virtual machines they have provisioned. CloudForms contains chargeback functionality that helps facilitate charging users for the resources their virtual machines use. The administrator is able to set rates based on compute, network, and storage resources. Reports can then be run to calculate the chargeback for each virtual machine.
One of the requests customers often have prior to the virtual machine being ordered, is to be able to show the user what the cost of the virtual machine will be.
Continue reading “Display Estimated VM Cost during Service Provisioning”
