CloudForms is Red Hat’s supported version of upstream ManageIQ, an infrastructure management platform. It lets you see, manage and deploy to various platforms like OpenStack, VMWare, RHEV, OpenShift and public cloud like AWS and Azure, with single pane of glass view across them all. It has its own orchestration engine but also integrates with Ansible for automated deployments.

As best I can tell, their CloudForms updated Statement of Direction article (behind paywall, sorry) shows that Red Hat is killing off support for non-Red Hat platforms like VMware, AWS, Azure, etc. The justification is to focus on open platforms, which I think means CloudForms will ultimately disappear entirely with Red Hat focusing on OpenShift instead.

We made a strategic decision to focus our management strategy on the future — open, cloud-native environments that promote portability across on-premise, private and public clouds.

CloudForms updated Statement of Direction

However to me this is still a big blow to users of the platform, where I’m sure most will have at least some VMWare to manage. Indeed, when implementing CloudForms at work and talking to Red Hat, they said that their most mature integration in CloudForms is with VMWare.

According to the Red Hat article, CloudForms with full platform support is being embedded into IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management and users are encouraged to “migrate your Red Hat CloudForms subscriptions to IBM Cloud Pak for Multicloud Management licenses.” Red Hat’s CloudForms Statement of Direction FAQ article lays out the migration path, which does confirm Red Hat will continue to support existing clients for the remainder of their subscription.

So in short, CloudForms from Red Hat is being crippled and will only support Red Hat products, which really means that users are being forced to buy IBM instead. Of course Red Hat is entitled to change their own products, but this move does seem curious when execs on both sides said they would remain independent. Maybe it’s better than killing CloudForms outright?

We can publicly say that all our products will survive in their current form and continue to grow. We will continue to support all our products; we’re separate entities and we’re going to have separate contracts, and there is no intention to de-emphasise any of our products and we’ll continue to invest heavily in it.

Jim Whitehurst as Red Hat CEO

Sometimes when you’re using KVM guests to test something, perhaps like a Ceph or OpenStack Swift cluster, it can be useful to have SSD and NVMe drives. I’m not talking about passing physical drives through, but rather emulating them.

NVMe drives

QEMU supports emulating NVMe drives as arguments on the command line, but it’s not yet exposed to tools like virt-manager. This means you can’t just add a new drive of type nvme into your virtual machine XML definition, however you can add those qemu arguments to your XML. This also means that the NVMe drives will not show up as drives in tools like virt-manager, even after you’ve added them with qemu. Still, it’s fun to play with!

In my previous blog post I showed how to set up InfluxDB and Grafana (and Prometheus). This is how I configured my OpenWrt devices to provide monitoring and graphing of my network.

OpenWrt includes support for collectd (and even graphing inside Luci web interface) so we can leverage this and send our data across the network to the monitoring host.