Red Hat is bringing OpenStack interoperability a step closer to reality with a new version of its server virtualization platform that aims to deliver a consistent management layer across on- and off-premise deployments. For customers, that means being able to transfer workloads between clouds without having to worry about compatibility constraints or gaps in service levels.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.3 adds the option of deploying the RHEV-M management console as a virtual machine on the host to conserve hardware resources, and provides a set of APIs for third party software vendors to backup and restore VMs. Admins can store server images on OpenStack Glacier and manage network topographies for their environments with the Neutron service. The project offer a standardized mechanism for deploying different technologies that gives the user more control security and compliance policies while also simplifying provisioning.

“Red Hat’s consistent improvements to the open KVM hypervisor and its concurrent virtualization management offerings now allow more customers to take control of their datacenters and build individualized paths to a private cloud infrastructure,” commented Radhesh Balakrishnan, the general manager of virtualization and OpenStack Red Hat.

RHEV 3.3 has been baked into Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0, a refreshed edition of the company’s private IaaS offering that “bridges operations over existing traditional virtualization environments, as well as new private and public cloud resources,” according to a release, The platform is powered by Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform, a repurposed version of Red Hat’s Linux distro designed for powering open source cloud deployments.

The firm says that the update introduces tighter integration across the board, including support for the CloudForms management console, which provides monitoring capabilities across multiple hypervisors and providers. Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 is available immediately.

Where the enterprise meets the public cloud

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It’s the latest development in leveraging open source to help the enterprise look and operate more like a public cloud. Red Hat has become a leading supporter of the OpenStack community, practically stealing the show at last year’s OpenStack Summit and steadily building integration points for public cloud offerings, including a new virtualization capability demoed at VMworld.

“In the last 12 months, every third conversation was about ‘I’m interested in OpenStack.’ Now it’s every other conversation,” Ashesh Badani, GM of Cloud BU and OpenShift at Red Hat, tells us during a recent visit to theCUBE. “We’re believers in community. When OpenStack started, we weren’t the first in, but we are now the largest contributor to it. We’re also seeing interest from a variety of areas,” Badani added, such as compute, storage, but also application lifecycle management. “You have choice that AWS is providing while you don’t have to use all the services, the same holds true from OpenStack.”

See Badani’s entire segment from theCUBE below:

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