Red Hat Inc., might already be a superpower where Linux is concerned, but it has no intention of resting on its laurels. It has ambitions to become a major player in the cloud as well, and to that end it’s launched an open hybrid cloud management solution called Red Hat CloudForms 3.1, unveiled yesterday at the VMworld 2014 event in San Francisco.

Few industry watchers will be surprised at Red Hat’s cloud ambitions. As far back as 2011, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst stated that VMware Inc., would be the company’s biggest competitor. These days that prediction is looking spot on, with VMware talking up OpenStack, and Red Hat now offering a range of cloud management tools to compete with its rivals’ offerings.

Despite the somewhat deceptive name, CloudForms 3.1 is an entirely new technology platform born out of Red Hat’s 2012 acquisition of cloud management and automation technology provider ManageIQ. It’s set to become a key part of Red Hat’s cloud plans, with the main focus being on OpenStack. But CloudForms 3.1 is far more flexible – being able to help admins run private, public and hybrid clouds, plus Amazon Web Services, VMware, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environments, and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager private clouds.

“Cloud management platforms are at the peak of the cloud management hype cycle right now, which means they are getting a lot of visibility for enterprises,” said Joe Fitzgerald, general manager for cloud management at Red Hat. “With CloudForms 3.1 enterprises can better leverage their existing infrastructures together with public clouds, as well as build and manage innovative new private clouds built on OpenStack.”

Also yesterday, Red Hat took the opportunity to announce an update to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform 5 (RHELOPS 5) built on the latest Icehouse community release. Despite Red Hat’s glossy-coated press release, it’s by no means a major new update, with the biggest changes being a “more robust” installer and new high availability capabilities that should at least help admins get the software up and running a little easier.

The installer features an intuitive, “wizard-style” graphical-user interface, which Red Hat claims will expedite the installation process. The main advantage is that it eliminates the need for deep command-line deployment expertise, whilst at the same time providing greater flexibility. As for the high availability, when enabled this provides uptime and scalability for the OpenStack controller and service nodes – and in the event of a service or node failure, the high-availability cluster manager will take action to recover as fast as possible, thus minimizing downtime.

Red Hat said that CloudForms 3.1 will become generally available from September 2014. As for the new RHELOPS 5 updates, Red Hat says these are availabile now.

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