Working with RedHat CloudForms (CF) for the last several months now, I’ve come to some architecture guides/recommendations along with some easy to understand vernacular explanations.

Region = database (all objects contained within)

Region 99 = rollup region for performance statistics, federated view across all regions

Zone = management system (vCenter, OpenStack, RHEVm, etc), typically for most users this will mean Datacenter.

With CF being an appliance, scaling out horizontally is quite easy and painless.

Appliance roles

Worker – (zone) – 1 for every ~500 VM’s, always going to be 2 for redundancy

WebUI

All capacity and utilization roles

vCenter

SmartState Analysis

DB (zone) – (bump to 8GB memory) – can grow very large to 10,000 VM’s – no certified pgcluster to support configuration yet – contains metadata, backup database, don’t over complicate

DB OPS

WebUI

WebUI (zone) – hide behind load balancer F5 (must pass session)

Reporting

DB Sync – rubyrep

Automation worker – can run on worker or break out

As you notice, each and every appliance has the UI role attached, allowing for UI access should the UI node be down for patching and/or break-fix.

Tags: Architecture, CloudForms, RedHat