Red Hat is building a policy-based cloud manager meant to spin up, deploy and, well, manage multiple Linux and Windows virtual images, their applications and their necessaries across clouds.

It's called Aeolus presumably after the Greek ruler of the winds.

It's advertised as "freeing users from cloud lock-in by making the choice of cloud provider - private, public, or hybrid - a simple launch-time option." It's theoretically supposed to pick the best solution, but it's also part of Red Hat's beta IaaS widgetry, CloudForms.

Red Hat says it wants Aeolus to be an open source project, but you know how those things go, the butcher never quite gets his thumb off the scale.

Support for EC2, Rackspace Cloud Hosting, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), VMware vSphere and Eucalyptus appears to be in some stage of test and development. Maybe by early next year it might be in some form of readiness. Maybe then it will look like something RightScale does.

It currently runs on 64-bit RHEL 6.1 or Fedora 14.

Red Hat says Aeolus consists of:

• Aeolus Conductor: A way to provide cloud resources to users, manage users' access to and use of those resources, and control users' instances in clouds. This lets users make intelligent choices about which cloud to use.
• Aeolus Composer: A way to build cloud-specific images from generic templates, so that users can choose clouds freely using compatible images.
• Aeolus Orchestrator: A way to manage clumps of instances in an organized way. Users should be able to automatically bring up a set of different instances on a single cloud or spanning multiple clouds, configure them, and tell them about each other.
• Aeolus HA Manager: A way to make instances or clumps of instances in the cloud highly available.

Besides those there's Audrey, a set of tools to do run-time configuration of cloud instances; a browser-based UI; Configure, a configuration script for setting up Aeolus; Image Factory, a daemon with a QMF interface for building cloud images; Image Warehouse, a daemon to move cloud images from cloud-to-cloud based on rules; Oz, an automated virtual machine installer; and Spherical, a Ruby API for VMware vSphere and ESXi. This stuff as far as we know is part of CloudForms.

See http://www.aeolusproject.org/ and http://spinder.fedorapeople.org/presentations/CloudForms_JON.pdf.