Red Hat solutions

Fusion HCI is a hyper-converged appliance for implementing OpenShift on bare metal. You can think of it as “OpenShift in a box”. The appliance consists of bare metal worker nodes, storage, and switches - plus optional GPUs for AI and machine learning workloads. This isn’t just a reference architecture - installing Fusion HCI provides a fully functional OpenShift cluster.

Everything is built with high availability in mind. Networking is fully redundant throughout the appliance. Proven software defined storage architectures ensures that workloads won’t lose access to their data in the event of the loss of drives or storage nodes. Backup and disaster recovery are built into the platform and managed as operators.

In fact, it’s all built as operators. The entire management stack for Fusion HCI is container native and can be managed “as code”. And that’s important when you’re not just dealing with a single appliance, but a whole fleet.

As the industry shifts towards containerization, it’s common to still see the need for virtual machines. There may be some middleware that realistically isn’t going to be containerized. Fusion HCI provides a platform for running containers and VMs side by side. That removes the need to maintain two separate infrastructure stacks, and the skills that go with them. With OpenShift Virtualization, VMs can be managed as just another Kubernetes resource, which is powerful when you consider gitops and “as code” capabilities of the platform.

Of course, you need a lot more than just the ability to host virtual machines. You need vm mobility, backup and restore, and other capabilities offered by traditional platforms. OpenShift Virtualization and Fusion have that covered. Live Migration handles mobility, and Fusion provides built in capabilities for backing up and restoring VMs.

Hosted Control Plane is a Red Hat technology that transforms Fusion HCI into a private cloud in a box. Carve up the appliance into multiple OpenShift clusters, each right-sized for their workloads. Provision clusters on demand, providing them with data services such as storage and backup. When clusters are no longer needed, decommission them and free up resources for future provisioning.

Hosted Control Plane also provides infrastructure efficiency. The control plane of each cluster you create is hosted as pods in a hub cluster, meaning you don’t need to dedicate three control nodes for each cluster.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management (ACM) allows you to manage a fleet of clusters from single console. It’s the tool that you’ll use to carve Fusion HCI into multiple clusters, provisioning clusters on demand. Simply specify how many nodes you need and the CPU and memory requirements, and a new cluster is created.

ACM goes well beyond a central control plane for your clusters. It also provides centralized management of applications across the clusters. Simply create a subscription to a git repository, and you can deploy the corresponding app to any of the managed clusters.