A recent study from IDC noted that in 2017, infrastructure IT spend for cloud environments is estimated at $41.7 billion. Further, 14.7 percent of that $41.7 billion is to be dedicated to private cloud infrastructure initiatives - that’s about $6 billion, if you were wondering.

If you haven’t noticed $6 billion is a massive chunk of cheddar- so why are people spending so much money on private cloud initiatives? Well with private cloud, you can optimize your existing IT resources to maximize server hardware utilization, increase security while meeting multiple compliance requirements, gain greater flexibility, and reduce operating costs. If you’d like to know how exactly you might go about achieving those results, you should head on over to Matthew Nolan’s webinar on Building a Private Cloud to fill in the gaps of what I just glossed over. You can also view and register for our broader private cloud webinar series here, but for now let’s talk about a couple of Red Hat tools which you can use to create your Private Cloud.

Red Hat Virtualization

Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) is an open, software-defined, easy to use, efficient infrastructure and centralized management platform for virtualized Linux and Windows workloads. Built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technologies, it allows customers to virtualize traditional applications and build a foundation for cloud-native and container-based workloads. RHV offers a high performing, highly-available, and more secure platform for mission-critical workloads, providing businesses a stable infrastructure that easily scales. Offering integrated management with a self-service user portal, RHV helps customers increase efficiency through consolidation and provide predictable virtual infrastructure value and expense.

Why Red Hat Virtualization?

Aside from avoiding vendor lock-in by using an open source solution for virtualization, RHV provides centralized management for the KVM hypervisor as well as compute, network, and storage resources. RHV also includes enterprise-level features to support mission critical applications like live migrations, multiple OS guest support, and multiple storage backends with Hyper Converged architectures available. RHV can take advantage of your existing staff’s skills, with a faster return on investment, including OpenStack integration and enhanced security from SELinux and sVirt.  

Red Hat CloudForms

Red Hat CloudForms offers unified management for hybrid environments, providing a consistent experience and functionality across container-based infrastructures, virtualization, private and public cloud platforms. Red Hat CloudForms enables enterprises to accelerate service delivery by providing self service, including complete operational and lifecycle management of the deployed services. It provides greater operational visibility through continuous discovery, monitoring and deep inspection of managed resources. And it provides compliance and governance via automated policy enforcement and remediation. Just like RHV, CloudForms can reduce operational costs by reducing or eliminating the manual processes that burden IT staff.

Why Red Hat Cloudforms?

CloudForms can manage your virtual machines on heterogeneous infrastructure already in production and optimize virtual resource utilization. By using Red Hat CloudForms, organizations can avoid the problem of vendor lock-in by migrating virtual machines to lower cost virtual infrastructure platforms and obtain more seamless operations across multiple hypervisors. In addition Cloudforms features Ansible Automation integration. By integrating Ansible automation into its management portfolio, Red Hat is delivering strategic management and automation capabilities to enterprises at massive scale. Below are some highlights of the Ansible integration with Red Hat CloudForms:

• Service Catalog. Service catalog items can now consist of Ansible Playbooks in addition to OpenStack Orchestration templates, Amazon Web Services CloudFormation templates, Microsoft Azure Stack images, RHV images, VMware images and more, enabling administrators to more rapidly define and publish a greater number of services for their users.
• Governance. Administrators can now use Ansible Playbooks to enforce many different IT policy models and more easily assess that deployed systems remain compliant, enforce security standards and optimize resources.
• Access to the Ansible ecosystem. More than 10,000 pre-built Ansible Playbooks and more than 1,000 integration modules can now be directly used in Red Hat CloudForms, delivered as IT services and used for policy enforcement and compliance.

Private Cloud, Together

The combined solution of Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Virtualization allows you to leverage traditional virtual infrastructure platforms and transform them into private cloud models. The solution provides visibility and control as well as a simple management console to easily manage a global infrastructure. With Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat CloudForms, you can achieve transparency across virtual, public, and private cloud infrastructure empowering users to expand and flex workloads in hybrid and public cloud environments. This solution will enable you to leverage cloud computing as a seamless and efficient process all while reducing cost and avoiding vendor lock-in.

An architecture of Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat CloudForms combined.

“Building a private cloud with Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat CloudForms” then goes into a demo of using the two tools in order to help create a private cloud environment. Again, there’s no real way for me to explain a demo in full over a blog so you might want to check out Matt’s Webinar for this, because it’s kind of important.

Red Hat Consulting offers a four-phase rollout for your cloud infrastructure initiative that starts with a Discovery Session. A typical Red Hat Discovery Session starts with a focus on use cases and identification of challenges. Along with Red Hat Consulting, you can look at possible technologies and solutions and create an action plan together to address any opportunities. Red Hat Consulting is a great way to see your cloud transformation through from beginning to end, while being supported by the experts. Check out the Red Hat Consulting Discovery Session Datasheet to learn more about Red Hat’s Discovery Sessions and when you’re ready click here to talk to a Red Hat consultant.

As always, feel free to let us know your thoughts on cloud, and any initiatives your organization might be involved in, in the comments section below.

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