November

CloudForms Service Bundle Creation using VM Provisioning and Ansible Tower Automation Job

Service catalog bundles are a really useful CloudForms feature that enable us to mix and match various existing service catalog items together to form bundles of tasks.

One of the more useful examples of a bundle is to create a new VM, and then run an Ansible Tower job template on the resulting VM to configure it with an application role. If we have an Ansible Tower server added to our CloudForms installation as an automation provider, this is quite simple. We described the procedure to configure an Ansible Tower provider in CloudForms as part of our previous series on Ansible Tower integration in CloudForms 4.1.

In this example we’ll combine two existing service catalog items. The first creates a new CentOS 7 virtual machine in a Red Hat Virtualization provider, and the second installs a simple LAMP stack using a job template defined in an Ansible Tower server, attached to CloudForms as an automation provider.

Each standalone catalog item has its own service dialog. The dialog for the VM provision service simply prompts for the service name and VM name, as follows:

if on a Jersey night

You are about to read d-m-u’s latest blog post. So it goes. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Center yourself. It’s a difficult task, as you know. We got a bunch of robot computer people sittin’ around with their faces stuffed in computer screens. Breathe. Ignore all the robot computer people commotion around you.

Build your Software Defined Data Center with Red Hat CloudForms and OpenStack

A few days ago, Michele Naldini posted a series on the [Red Hat Developer Blog] [https://developers.redhat.com] about how to build a Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) using Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat OpenStack Platform.
Red Hat CloudForms allows to more quickly deploy and scale Red Hat OpenStack Platform (also known as OSP) private clouds, combine existing IT infrastructure investments, and federate public cloud deployments. This series includes both background information and hands-on tips to implement a full SDDC in practice.
The first part of the series covers the introduction, the goals, some key information about OSP and more specifically Heat, OSP configuration, and pre-requisites. It also illustrates how to start working with OSP in order to spin a new operating service based on a 3 tier deployment (2 web servers, 2 app servers, and 1 database) using 2 load balancers (1 for the web servers and 1 for the app servers).
The second part focuses on CloudForms, where it shows how to create a service based on Heat templates, using service dialog, and how to restrict services to a set of users. Both Operator UI and the Self-Service UI are used in the exercise. The blog series also contains a summary video that covers all steps explained as part of the deployment. Read more on the Red Hat Developer Blog:

Name of H Release

The results of the poll on the name of the H release are in. Jon Ludvig Hammer is the winner! Looking forward to all the striking features that will come in the Hammer release :hammer: :hammer: Thanks to all that voted - we had 97 total votes for the H-Release.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Because you know I'm all about the bugs

It’s that time of year again what with; Thanksgiving, Black Friday deals, and many other seasonal holidays around the corner. On everyone’s mind though before we get to all that are… …bugs. Lots and lots of bugs. Well more specifically bug fixes. With the Gaprindashvili release just around the corner, the team is busy busy, fixing bugs and making the bestest release of ManageIQ yet.

Implementing Continuous Integration for CloudForms using Git and Travis

Christian Jung recently posted another interesting article as a follow-up on Best Practice Recommendations for Automate. This time, he focuses on setting up Continuous Integration for Red Hat CloudForms.

In his blog post, Christian discusses how to use common development tools like GIT and Travis in conjunction with CloudForms to configure a datastore pointing to a git repository and set a Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) environment. This feature is available in CloudForms since CloudForms 4.2.

Last Week in ManageIQ: Bugs In Fix Out

Hello there! This week’s LWIMIQ is contributed by Harpreet Hope everyone in the US had a wonderful time enjoying Thanksgiving feast with family and friends, and of course shopping Black Friday deals. With Christmas and New Year right around the corner everyone must be in holiday mode, while our team at ManageIQ is working hard to get Gaprindashvili as stable as possible. Since we are in a bug fixing phase not much to report features/enhancement wise from my side.

Multi-tier Application Deployment using Ansible and CloudForms (Video)

This article is a follow up on our previous blog post VMware provisioning example] using Ansible, where we deployed a simple virtual machine on VMware using Ansible from the CloudForms service catalog. In this week’s demonstration, we go a step further and provision a multi-tier application on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Once provisioned, the application lifecycle, as well as all day 2 operations are performed from Red Hat CloudForms.