What this book covers

Chapter 1, Red Hat CloudForms Internals, highlights some of the challenges faced in managing a hybrid cloud environment, introduces Red Hat CloudForms, and provides information about its architecture, components, and features. They provide a unified management platform.

Chapter 2, Installing Red Hat CloudForms on Red Hat OpenStack, shows you how to deploy CloudForms in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack environment as an instance; perform initial configuration tasks, such as setting the hostname, network parameters, and time zone; set up an internal PostgreSQL database; and start the management engine process.

Chapter 3, Building a Hybrid Cloud Environment Using Red Hat CloudForms, explains how to build a hybrid cloud by adding providers and viewing and editing provider information after adding. We also take a look at provisioning dialogs, which are used to raise a provisioning request.

Chapter 4, Provisioning Instances Using Red Hat CloudForms, outlines the steps to provision an instance into Amazon EC2 and OpenStack from the CloudForms web console. This chapter also introduces service catalogs. These can also be used to provision instances and virtual machines.

Chapter 5, Life Cycle Management Using Red Hat CloudForms, explores one of the key features of Red Hat CloudForms—life cycle management. In this chapter, you learn about the different stages of life cycle management, that is, request, approval, and retirement.

Chapter 6, Automation Using Red Hat CloudForms, talks about the automate model of Red Hat CloudForms, its hierarchy, and creating organization units such as domains, namespaces, classes, and instances. Here, you also learn how to create and invoke methods in automation.

Chapter 7, Managing Red Hat CloudForms, shows you how to control and govern the installation of Red Hat CloudForms and the hybrid cloud infrastructure using policies. We cover different types of policies and see how to take automated actions based on events and conditions.

Chapter 8, Monitoring a Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Using Red Hat CloudForms, highlights the Insight feature set of Red Hat CloudForms. In this chapter, you learn how to view information about the hybrid cloud using the cloud intelligence dashboard, work with reports, collect usage metrics from virtual machines, use chargeback for billing and metering, and use alerts and the SmartState analysis.

Chapter 9, Optimizing Using Red Hat CloudForms, covers another key feature of Red Hat CloudForms, which is the optimization of the hybrid cloud. This chapter focuses on how to perform capacity planning of the virtual infrastructure by collecting and analyzing capacity and utilization data, creating charts of the data, and viewing the utilization trends.

Chapter 10, APIs for Red Hat CloudForms, introduces the two supported APIs in Red Hat CloudForms, that is, the REST API and the SOAP API.