Red Hat steers enterprise customers towards cloud native

• First stop Microsoft and Linux application virtualisation
• Then on to a container-based, cloud native environment
• Virtualization 4.3 will power modern systems while remaining fully open

One of the big directions for cloud is outwards, like the expanding universe. So the race is on to spread cloud applications between clouds (multi-cloud), from core to edge; and across and between public and private cloud domains, and to do all this as transparently and as automatically as possible.

Red Hat has made a couple of announcements this week to designed to put its users on the ‘journey’ to full ‘cloud native’ operation.

It has announced changes to help push OpenStack deployments out to the edge on its OpenStack Platform 13. The idea here is to enable cloud applications to take advantage of low latency where the application requires it. It’s thought that this will be especially attractive to telcos.

Red Hat has also just launched Virtualization 4.3, which it describes as supporting high performing, highly-available, and more easily scalable virtual machine workloads. It’s aimed at the enterprise market, being the latest version of  Red Hat’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered virtualization platform.

The overall idea is to get enterprise customers to virtualise their Microsoft and Linux applications using virtual machines, and then to move them inexorably towards the more powerful, highly reliable, container-based, cloud native environment. Red Hat says the solution is built on the trusted Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is designed to deliver greater security, easier interoperability and improved integration across enterprise IT environments.

Virtualization 4.3, it claims, will power modern systems while remaining fully open and help reduce costs associated with proprietary solutions.

“Red Hat Virtualization allows customers to more easily virtualize traditional workloads, while building a foundation to power future cloud-native and containerised workloads,” claims Red Hat. ”Many companies have benefitted from a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) after implementing Red Hat Virtualization.”

New capabilities and enhancements include:

• Expanded software-defined networking (SDN) - With support for the latest Red Hat OpenStack Platform (version 12, 13 and 14), Red Hat Virtualization 4.3 offers more flexibility and customer choice in SDN solutions, providing an open technology stack that can more easily integrate with existing technologies to meet specific business needs.

• Powerful automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation - End-to-end automated configuration, deployment and validation are made possible with Red Hat Ansible Automation. New roles include deployment of the Red Hat Virtualization Manager through Ansible, as well as creation and management of physical and logical resources such as hosts, clusters and data centers.

• IBM announced late last year that it was buying Red Hat in a $34 billion all cash deal, so it’s not surprising that IBM support pops up at this stage in the form of IBM POWER9 support. IBM’s latest POWER architecture provides high performance for big data and resource-intensive database workloads. Red Hat Virtualization supports using IBM POWER8 or POWER9 virtual machines within the data center.

• Modern operating system support - With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 beta guest support on Red Hat Virtualization, users will now be able to run production workloads on the industry-leading Linux operating systems in a virtualized environment with planned support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 at its release.

Red Hat Virtualization 4.3 will be available as a standalone offering, as an integrated offering with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and as part of Red Hat Cloud Suite or Red Hat Virtualization Suite.