The difference between OpenStack and Red Hat Cloudforms

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I am new to OpenStack and Red Hat CloudForms. I am trying to understand what is the difference between OpenStack and CloudForms in terms of spining vm's.

If a client having multiple VMware infrastructure then I can use either CloudForms or OpenStack to spin the vm's. Both providing UI to manage the resources. Both providing orchestration facility to spin the vm's based on template.

So what would be the best advantage item of OpenStack which will make me to go with it instead of Red Hat CloudForms (I am not considering the other advantages of CloudForms at this moment. But yeah it will help me to control multiple cloud through a single window)

Long story short:
CloudForms can directly interact with VMware so why should a person consider OpenStack at this point. Because even If he build OpenStack on top of VMware , requesting a vm through CloudForms will send API call to OpenStack and from OpenStack it will ask vCenter to spin a vm, which involves multiple layers.

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redhatopenstackmanageiq

1 Answers

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As you already noticed it is hard to compare and it depends on the tasks that you would like to solve.

OpenStack is a toolbox of different services that create the virtualisation of your resources and manage them. Most of the services are used to keep the cloud running. It is a cloud provider from the CloudForms aspect.

Red Hat CloudForms (and an upstream open-source version called ManageIQ) is a cloud management tool that allows you to manage more different infrastructure providers, create catalogs of services that are provided to the users. For each service you can create and application form and provide the information (if needed) to people who can (dis)approve the usage of resources - in other words this is the integration of claiming for computer resources into the enterprise process work-flows. Also here is charge back, where allows you to create bills for specific users, departments, etc. This tool is more fine-grained in management aspect. Red Hat CloudForms do not take care of the virtualisation or networking, they have special providers for this.

Maybe the following question will also improve your understanding: What are the advantages ManageIQ has over OpenStack Horizon? I am currently working on Horizon but was wondering if ManageIQ is better