The providers for Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform now include full networking providers. This means that you can get a complete inventory of networking entities such as Networks, Subnets, Routers, Floating IPs, Network Ports and Load Balancers.
Also, you can visually see how these various entities are connected with topology view, which is available for all of the providers.
Your storage assets now become first-class managed entities with CloudForms 4.2. We have started with support for the OpenStack Cinder (block) and Swift (object) storage modules.
With the new storage provider, you can see inventory, events and metrics for your Cloud Volumes, as well as create and manage snapshots and backups of the storage volumes.
We’ve worked on standardizing all of the provider dashboards to have a common, fresh look and feel. This helps make the CloudForms user interface more seamless and allows users to be more efficient in finding the information they need.
CloudForms 4.2 can now be deployed in a federated configuration. This allows centralized administrative actions, such as provisioning, power operations and retirement, to be performed at a global region, but executed in local regions.
A lot of attention this release was focused on improving the performance and responsiveness of CloudForms. Pages that presented excessive load times have been addressed, reducing page load times by 90% or more. On the all-VMs page in particular, page rendering times dropped from 93 seconds to 0.5 seconds for 20,000 VMs. Similarly, efforts have been made to address memory consumption on the appliance, in particular reducing the memory consumed processing alert profiles by 50%.
A technology preview of the middleware provider, with support for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, has been introduced this release. This provider will provide inventory, metrics and events for JBoss application servers and EAP databases. You can manage the deployment of new application servers and data sources, control the servers via power operations, view capacity and utilization data for middleware resources, and use the topology view to see how the various middleware entities are related and cross-linked.
CloudForms 4.2 brings significant enhancements to the cloud management platform and expands into new areas with the Storage and Middleware providers. Performance, uniform dashboards and centralized administration makes it simpler for organizations to gain the efficiency that deploying CloudForms provides. Although we’ve come a long way with this release, there is still more work to do. Let’s pause to celebrate and then on to the next release!
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