The introduction of Embedded Ansible with CloudForms 4.5 enabled administrators to create CloudForms services that use Ansible playbooks instead of Ruby methods to perform tasks. Successive versions of CloudForms have expanded this capability, and automation developers can now construct complex CloudForms Automate workflows using Ansible playbooks alongside traditional Ruby methods. Part 1 of this series will discuss two Ansible roles that have been included in CFME 5.9.2 and later. The roles enable an embedded Ansible playbook to integrate closely with CloudForms and participate in an autom ..read more

Which button should I click on?   As a CloudForms user, do you ever get frustrated, wondering which button to click on or how to get to your selected location?   If your answer to any of these or similar questions is yes, then let me tell you that your life is going to get easier. Why does CloudForms need to be that complicated? The truth is that it doesn’t and we (with your help) are working on it. Have you already noticed any design changes in CloudForms? Has your menu changed or some reports make more sense now? Sometimes small and at first sight irrelevant changes can bring you peace of ..read more

Red Hat CloudForms allows users to put both VM provisioning and Ansible Tower jobs in the same catalog bundle, with the intention of having that tower job of customizing the VM that was just provisioned.  However, it’s not as simple as adding a VM catalog item, and then an Ansible Tower catalog item. This post will guide you through the nuances of utilizing Tower jobs in CloudForms step by step.   Why can’t I just use Update on Launch when CloudForms is a source in Red Hat Tower’s inventory?   You can, as long as you don’t mind the jobs not being concurrent for that inventory.  If you have th ..read more

The CloudForms team is proud to announce the release of CloudForms 5.0 Beta1. Based on the ManageIQ Ivanchuk release, this release contains several enhancements and bug fixes and is the result of about many months of upstream development. Some of the notable enhancements include: Ansible improvements, making easier to exchange parameters between CloudForms and Ansible. Reduced appliance resource footprint.  Lots of improvements on the User Experience UX and scalability For more details and a list of all other improvements see the release notes. We’d like to encourage all of our customers to ..read more

Red Hat CloudForms allows users to put both VM provisioning and Ansible Tower jobs in the same catalog bundle, with the intention of having that tower job of customizing the VM that was just provisioned.  However, it’s not as simple as adding a VM catalog item, and then an Ansible Tower catalog item. This post will guide you through the nuances of utilizing Tower jobs in CloudForms step by step.   Why can’t I just use Update on Launch when CloudForms is a source in Red Hat Tower’s inventory?   You can, as long as you don’t mind the jobs not being concurrent for that inventory.  If you have th ..read more

Ansible continues to grow and is the strategic automation engine for Red Hat’s business. Having a solid and constantly improving integration with Ansible is key for CloudForms’ future success.   Ansible Tower Workflows are widely used in by the industry to orchestrate and govern interactions between different playbooks. CloudForms has been able to run Ansible Tower Jobs since its 4.1 release. Starting with CloudForms 4.7, we will expand this support and will be able to utilize Workflows from the Service Catalog. Setup CloudForms is using the concept of Providers, to integrate with other sys ..read more

Ansible continues to grow and is the strategic automation engine for Red Hat’s business. Having a solid and constantly improving integration with Ansible is key for CloudForms’ future success. Ansible Tower Workflows are widely used in by the industry to orchestrate and govern interactions between different playbooks. CloudForms has been able to run Ansible Tower Jobs since its 4.1 release. Starting with CloudForms 4.7, we will expand this support and will be able to utilize Workflows from the Service Catalog. Setup CloudForms is using the concept of Providers, to integrate with other syste ..read more

Red Hat Cloudforms provides several ways to customize virtual machine provisioning,  the out-of-the-box VM Provisioning State Machine has multiple steps through which VM provisioning request crawl, among them one of the step is PostProvison, this step is used to perform post-provisioning activities on the provisioned virtual system.  In this article, I will explain how to customize PostProvison method using an example of ‘add an additional disk to the VM’ use case. Use case VMWare Template from which virtual machines suppose to be provisioned has two disks attached, we would like to use this ..read more

Download this Summit Quick Reference Guide for CloudForms for a complete list of CloudForms sessions and labs at Red Hat Summit 2019. A few highlights: Hybrid cloud management strategies and best practices Learn how Red Hat’s hybrid cloud management strategy is evolving to address customer needs. Hear how traditional management products, such as Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat CloudForms are being connected with Red Hat Ansible Tower and new SaaS solutions to provide customers with comprehensive and flexible hybrid cloud management options. Hybrid cloud cost management challenges, opportunities ..read more

Red Hat Cloudforms provides several ways to customize virtual machine provisioning,  the out-of-the-box VM Provisioning State Machine has multiple steps through which VM provisioning request crawl, among them one of the step is PostProvison, this step is used to perform post-provisioning activities on the provisioned virtual system.  In this article, I will explain how to customize PostProvison method using an example of ‘add an additional disk to the VM’ use case. Use case VMWare Template from which virtual machines suppose to be provisioned has two disks attached, we would like to use this ..read more