Red Hat, the open-source vendor, has updated its CloudForms infrastructure management application, giving it deeper integration with Red Hat Ansible Automation and improvements designed to streamline deployments.

The new Red Hat CloudForms 4.7 release allows IT departments to give users capabilities that will allow them to provision and manage virtual machines, while ensuring compliance across their environments.

CloudForms provides unified management for hybrid-cloud environments, which lets enterprises speed service delivery and maintain operational and life-cycle management while providing users with the capabilities they need to do their jobs.

Red Hat says the deeper integration with Ansible Automation is made possible by making more Ansible capabilities available natively within CloudForms. The improvements now allow users to execute Ansible Tower workflows directly from the CloudForms interface, which was not possible in earlier versions. By doing this, CloudForms 4.7 can help organizations to speed IT deployments while improving service stability and performance. Red Hat Ansible Automation, which is powered by Ansible Engine, provides agentless IT automation capabilities.

Red Hat’s Joe Fitzgerald

Also included in the latest version are new and enhanced integrations with physical infrastructure and networking providers, including Nuage Networks Virtualized Services Platform (VSP) and Lenovo XClarity, which aim to help users better manage physical and network compute infrastructure alongside virtual and multicloud services.

Joe Fitzgerald, Red Hat vice president for management products, said the latest CloudForms application is targeted at customers who want to better manage and oversee their cloud investments.

“While migrating applications to hybrid -loud infrastructure has become a priority for many enterprise IT organizations, effective management across physical, virtual and private cloud infrastructure remains a key building block to fully adopting hybrid cloud,” said Fitzgerald. “Red Hat CloudForms 4.7 provides a necessary stepping stone for organizations seeking to harness public-cloud services in tandem with on-premises infrastructure, enabling users to gain increased control over data-center environments while providing a unified and consistent set of management capabilities for disparate on-premises resources.”

The latest version (3.4) of Red Hat Ansible Tower, which provides an automation framework for public cloud services, was released in January and includes new workflow enhancements and other broadened features.

The previous version (3.3), released last September, gained new capabilities to work with multiple versions of the Ansible automation platform and vastly improved integration with the Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. That version was the first to offer the ability to be configured directly through OpenShift.