UPDATED 01:13 EDT / SEPTEMBER 19 2016

NEWS

Red Hat’s new installer lets you spin up a private cloud in just 4 hours

Red Hat Inc. wants to help organizations deploy private clouds faster, and to that end has just unveiled a new tool called the QuickStart Cloud Installer (QCI) that should make it possible. The new installer comes just one week after the company rolled out Red Hat OpenStack Platform 9, based on the OpenStack Mitaka release.

Red Hat’s new installer differs from previous installation tools the company has released in that it’s an all-in-one solution for installing various technologies from its product suite, including CloudForms, OpenShift and Red Hat Virtualization as well as OpenStack. Based on Red Hat’s Satellite system management technology, QCI allows users to create a fully functional private cloud environment in less than four hours, the company claims.

In an interview with eWeek, Lars Herrmann, general manager of Integrated Solutions Business Unit at Red Hat, said QCI makes use of existing product installation APIs and installer technologies for orchestrating deployments instead of replacing them.

“For instance, QCI utilizes OpenStack Director to orchestrate the actual deployment of the OpenStack nodes instead of directly provisioning them from QCI,” Herrmann explained.

What this means is that instead of installing each Red Hat product separately, QCI enables provisioning of the various infrastructures via a single web-based interface, which means there’s no need to switch between different installation interfaces. Once set up, all deployed infrastructures are automatically registered with Red Hat’s satellite server for rolling product updates. QCI also performs configuration verification and validation, which includes auto-generating a list of minimum system requirements needed for the deployment.

QCI should prove itself to be a very handy tool for organizations that need to whip up a cloud in the fastest time possible, but one major downside is that it doesn’t yet support Red Hat’s most recent OpenStack release. For now, it only supports Red Hat OpenStack Platform 8, a problem that Red Hat’s Herrmann told eWeek was simply due to bad timing.

“When QCI 1.0 was under development, OSP 9 was not yet available to be integrated,” he admitted. “Support for OSP 8 has been included in the initial release, with plans to add support to RHOSP 10 in the next release of QCI.”

The release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform 10 is still some months away however. OpenStack version 10, dubbed “Newton”, won’t be released until next month, and vendors such as Red Hat typically roll out their update software several months after the new version comes out.

Photo Credit: mask8 photos by Kirils Fostr & Aleksey Zharkov via Compfight cc

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