How it works

The ACM add-on is installed onto a Red Hat OpenShift cluster that acts as the hub cluster. During or after installation, you import one or more managed clusters that you want to manage with ACM. From the hub cluster, you can access your multi-cluster dashboard to manage, observe and operate the managed clusters that you imported.

ACM plan overviews

Review the description of each ACM plan.

Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes

• ACM for Kubernetes provides the capabilities to address common challenges that administrators and site reliability engineers face when managing multiple clusters. Clusters and applications, whether containerized or virtualized, are all visible and managed from a central console, with preconfigured governance policies that can be applied consistently across environments. Users can run their operations from anywhere on Red Hat OpenShift® and manage other supported Kubernetes clusters in their fleet.

Coming soon Advanced Cluster Management for Virtualization

• ACM for Virtualization is a centralized tool that simplifies the management of virtual machines (VMs) deployed to Red Hat OpenShift® Virtualization Engine clusters as well as the clusters themselves. This license type provides a centralized platform for provisioning, monitoring and decomissioning VMs across multiple clusters.

• This solution is a version of Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes and is designed for organizations that want to manage VMs exclusively.

ACM for Kubernetes

Learn about the features and benefits the ACM for Kubernetes plan.

Fleet management

Access a unified fleet management control plane that aids in provisioning clusters and applications and enhances cluster lifecycle management.

• Simplified IT operations with self-service cluster setup to reduce operational overhead.

• End-to-end visibility and control from a central console to reduce context switching and cognitive load.

• Hub-and-spoke architecture for managing all configurations and Kubernetes clusters.

• Integration with all major cloud providers and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-conformant Kubernetes distributions for wide operational control.

• Enhanced cluster lifecycle management with features like worker pool scaling and cluster hibernation.

Fleet observability

Utilize comprehensive multi-cluster observability of fleet health for increased visibility.

• Customized dashboards based on defined metrics.

• Enhanced SRE experience with included dashboards.

• Proactive monitoring of cluster health and performance to help decrease mean time to resolution.

• Fleet health monitoring with ability to sort, filter, and scan individual clusters and user workloads.

• Dynamic search to identify, isolate, and resolve issues across distributed workloads.

• Integration with Red Hat Lightspeed for Red Hat OpenShift to provide intelligent analysis.

Application lifecycle deployment

Rapidly and consistently deploy workloads across a fleet or for a single cluster.

• GitOps integrations for automatic and consistent application deployments and content delivery.

• Increased application availability with placement integration.

• Application topology view for wider visibility of application health.

• Persistent volume replication for application migration.

• Multisite, multicluster disaster recovery capabilities to recover and continue critical applications.

Multicluster observability for fleet health and optimization

Deliver an enhanced site reliability engineering (SRE) experience with out-of-the-box multicluster dashboards that can store long-term historical data and provide an overview of fleet health and optimization.

Unified multicluster lifecycle management

Create, upgrade, and destroy Kubernetes clusters reliably, consistently, and at scale by using an open source programming model that supports Infrastructure as Code (IaC) best practices and design principles.

Configuration management with policy-based governance

Implement automated governance to continuously verify and maintain optimal configuration settings across critical IT domains, including cluster infrastructure, identity and access management, network management, cost optimization, security and compliance.

Advanced application lifecycle management

Use open standards and deploy applications, using placement rules that are integrated into existing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and governance controls.

Edge management at scale

With single-node OpenShift clusters and Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, continuously scale while ensuring availability in high-latency, low-bandwidth edge use cases.

Business continuity

Use Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management, along with the broader Red Hat portfolio, to ensure the applications stay up and running.

Next steps

Get started using ACM by installing the add-on onto your hub cluster.