Red Hat Inc. is bringing the centralized management and reporting capabilities of its Satellite platform to the hybrid cloud in a continuation of its efforts to expand beyond the operating system. The move marks the company’s first major product update  since the departure of Brian Stevens, who set it on the course to becoming more than just a Linux distributor as chief technology officer.

Red Hat Satellite 6 extends the consolidated controls that its users have come to know and love to a host of new platforms, most notably the company’s OpenStack distribution. The offering plays a central part in Red Hat’s long-term growth strategy, combining the capabilities of the project with its already well-established Linux flavor and virtualization solution in a tightly integrated bundle.

The Red Hat OpenStack platform ranks as one the leading distributions in the ecosystem, but it hasn’t quite achieved the ratchet effect that the open-source stalwart was hoping for. Approximately 70 percent of OpenStack workloads currently run on Ubuntu Linux, according to developer Canonical Ltd., despite the operating system having a considerably smaller enterprise install base than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).  Bringing the management capabilities of Satellite into the mix has the potential to turn the tables.

The software matches the simplicity of Ubuntu with a broad array of automation features that can eliminate much of the manual work involved in provisioning and maintaining Linux servers, not only on-premise but  in the public cloud, Red Hat claimed. Besides OpenStack, the latest version of Satellite also works on Amazon Inc.’s infrastructure-as-a-service platform, which is a particular favorite in the developer community.

On top of that, Red Hat added support for its KVM-based virtualization solution and, in the spirit of open-source, VMware’s rival hypervisor. This means practitioners can now use Satellite as a single point of control and visibility into their environments, including bare-metal servers, virtual systems and public cloud deployments. That value proposition is more extensive than what VMware itself is offering with vSphere, which puts Red Hat in a potentially better position to address the increasingly heterogeneous nature of enterprise architectures.

To make it easier for admins to manage all the different components of their infrastructure, version 6.0 makes it possible to deploy local Satellite instances  in various parts of the network so as to eliminate the potentially substantial delays associated with rolling out updates to a remote location.  The release also introduces integration with several complementary open-source projects, notably the Puppet configuration tool and the Foreman lifecycle management utility.

The upgraded Satellite  packs a number of homegrown automation capabilities as well. Idle servers are now automatically detected and made available for search, while any configuration discrepancies that may exist on a newly discovered machine are immediately corrected. Additionally, the platform now enables admins to monitor the status of their RHEL subscriptions from a single dashboard instead of having to manually map out their organizations’ license inventories.

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