Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6, featuring updates designed to serve as the foundation for building OpenStack-powered clouds for enterprise businesses with advanced cloud users, telecommunications companies, Internet service providers (ISPs), and public cloud hosting providers.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform delivers the foundation for a production-ready cloud, integrating Red Hat’s hardened and agile OpenStack technology with the security and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform sets a new standard for OpenStack deployments, with customers in production in every region, spanning industry verticals and enterprises of various sizes in education, financial services, government, healthcare, retail, and telecommunications.
Building on its innovative co-engineered design, Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 strengthens Red Hat’s production-ready cloud platform through advancements in both the Linux and OpenStack components. Interoperability and ease of use continue to be at the forefront, starting with updates to Red Hat’s intuitive graphical installer and management tools that create greater efficiency and reduce the complexities of a cloud deployment.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 is based on the OpenStack Juno release and includes several new features aimed at easing enterprise deployments of OpenStack technology within existing data centres and capabilities specific to telecommunications providers to enable Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) deployments among carriers, including:
- IPv6 support, for both provider and tenant networks, enabling customers to assign IPv6 addresses across physical networks and OpenStack Networking (Neutron) virtual routers in stateless and stateful modes.
- Neutron High Availability offers an upgraded OpenStack experience with Neutron agents in “active-active” mode for high availability configuration. This availability improves redundancy for networking, providing service uptime and improving stability for larger-scale production clouds.
- Single root I/O virtualisation (SR-IOV) networking, supported by a new driver, enables users to execute network switching directly on their hardware, bypassing the hypervisor and virtual switch levels.
- Support for Multi-LDAP backends and domains, all within a single Identity service node, easing the installation and configuration processes for the platform, as well as long-term daily operations.
- Full support for data processing, moves the Sahara service from tech preview to a fully supported feature that enables big data workloads.
- Deeper Ceph integration with new capabilities for OpenStack Compute (Nova) and OpenStack Block Storage (Cinder), including full support for ephemeral volumes backed by the Ceph block device. This enables ‘diskless’ compute nodes and near-instantaneous booting of new virtual machines.
- New tech preview features, highlightingRed Hat’s continued innovation in the OpenStack space with feature debuts of unsupported technology previews, including bare metal provisioning and TripleO deployment and management.
Interoperability
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 furthers Red Hat’s commitment to enabling customers to avoid vendor lock-in and achieve interoperability. With continued integrated support for Red Hat CloudForms hybrid management platform, Red Hat recently announced a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform cloud management API and a certification process for third-party cloud management tools, expanding the company’s commitment to open platform development and customer choice.
Partner Ecosystem
The Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network aims to provide greater cloud versatility and ease the integration with existing datacenter technology and third-party plugins. With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6, the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network now boasts more than 275 certified OpenStack partners, with more than 1,000 solutions certified for use on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform.
“Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6 delivers enterprise-grade and telco-ready features, fuelled by deep engagements with hundreds of customers and partners across the globe, to enable an open cloud infrastructure. Backed by our robust partner ecosystem, this release can enable a wider variety of enterprises and cloud service providers to quickly transition to an OpenStack-powered cloud infrastructure,” said Radhesh Balakrishnan, General Manager, OpenStack, Red Hat.
“Cisco is excited to bring the innovations and enhancements of OpenStack’s tenth release (Juno) to our customers through our collaboration with Red Hat. Our joint solution, Cisco UCS Integrated Infrastructure for Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, offers validated designs and reference architectures for deploying Red Hat’s enterprise-ready distribution on Cisco’s complete turnkey solution for compute, networking and storage. The joint solution also includes coordinated support and consulting services from Cisco, to simplify and accelerate OpenStack deployment,” added Lew Tucker, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for Cloud, Cisco.
Availability
Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 6, engineered with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, is available globally starting today.
