Red Hat Inc. is rolling out a new version of its OpenStack platform based on the latest “Ocata” release.

A rather low-key release, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 is mainly about the improvements to existing features rather than any revolutionary new capabilities. These include a better management experience through the tighter integration of Red Hat CloudForms, and greater support for composable roles, a relatively new feature that makes it easier to customize OpenStack deployments at scale.

The tightened integration with Red Hat CloudForms is designed to make Red Hat’s OpenStack distribution easier to manage in enterprise environments. CloudForms is Red Hat’s hybrid cloud management solution, and through it users can now access and control OpenStack regions and multiple domains, giving them a better view of the platform’s health and efficiency, the company said. CloudForms also enables more simplified storage management through something called volume snapshot management functions, which allows users to create, list and delete volumes from the same console.

Red Hat is also making it easier for enterprises that run highly customized OpenStack deployments stay current with the latest version. Composable roles are a feature in OpenStack that’s used to modify deployments for specific needs at scale, but one major flaw is they make it “challenging” to upgrade to new versions of OpenStack, the company said. Now, Red Hat reckons it has eliminated that problem by introducing the ability to upgrade composable roles themselves. The result is a more “adaptable and consistent” experience when updating to a new version of OpenStack, Red Hat claimed.

In addition, composable roles now have more functionality. Red Hat said they can be used to separate or compose OpenStack services individually, meaning users can now add components such as databases or messaging services on specific nodes according to their requirements.

The release also adds new networking capabilities including support for something called VLAN-aware virtual machines. This enables OpenStack-based VMs to send and receive VLAN encapsulated traffic while being deployed over Open vSwitch, which is a software implementation of a virtual multilayer network switch, designed to enable effective network automation through programmatic extensions.

Last, Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11 now enables the co-location of Red Hat Ceph Storage with OpenStack compute nodes as a standard feature. This ability, which was previously available in preview, enables “storage mirroring” to simplify data replication between sites and improve disaster recovery.

Admittedly the latest release won’t excite too many users, but the focus on enhancing current functionality over new features can be seen as further evidence that OpenStack has finally graduated as a solid and dependable enterprise-grade infrastructure platform that’s ready to handle advanced workloads in production.

Red Hat said its new OpenStack release will be generally available in coming weeks.

Photo: Red Hat