Red Hat Goes All in on AI-Powered Lightspeed System Admin Tools

Red Hat launched a new generation of AI-driven system administration tools last week at its annual Red Hat Summit. The enhancements are designed to streamline Linux management, address the ongoing skills gap in system administration and support the growing complexity of hybrid cloud and AI workloads. All of this is part of Red Hat’s Lightspeed services.

The newest member of the Lightspeed family is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 Lightspeed. This generative AI (GenAI) assistant is integrated directly into RHEL 10. Lightspeed provides context-aware recommendations and actionable guidance at the shell to help system administrators troubleshoot issues, ensure compliance, and apply best practices without combing through documentation.

This tool leverages decades of RHEL-specific expertise and is positioned as both a productivity booster and a training aid for less-experienced staff, addressing the chronic shortage of skilled Linux administrators.

Scott McCarty, Red Hat’s global senior principal product manager, explained in a panel, “This really expands the usability of RHEL, making it easier for less-trained users to access and apply our knowledge quickly. Architects can benefit, too; it’s about surfacing life cycle data and roadmaps more clearly to help with long-term infrastructure planning.”

Red Hat’s senior director of product management, Raj Das, added, “You just type in a plain English query saying, ‘Hey, why is this not working?’ and what the RAG [retrieval-augmented generation] application does effectively is it goes out, searches our knowledge base, searches our manuals, searches our documentation, searches our support cases, and comes back with effectively what you need to do.”

The Lightspeed Umbrella

This is all part of a broader adoption of AI in Red Hat’s support operations. In an interview, Red Hat CTO Chris Wright said Lightspeed is a brand umbrella. Ansible Lightspeed was the first one. “It’s been out for a few years, and that was primarily focused on generative AI building playbooks. Since then, it’s expanded to have a more chat-like interface to help with Ansible and OpenShift Lightspeed.”

In every case, Wright continued, “The goal is to make the user experience of the product, to improve the user experience of the product and make it easier to use our software and the ease of use is coming through our years of expertise in building and delivering the software essentially encoded into a model.” The goal is to “give people your own personal assistant.”

In RHEL Lightspeed’s case, that AI buddy is “pulling from our knowledge bases and our experience from decades in the Linux space. It’s more than just an AI agent, though, or RHEL 10 Lightspeed’s command line tool. Besides a kind of in-the-box assistant, there’s also a set of APIs that are used to manage our systems, to interact with our systems, and those we can expose through tools interface as MCP [Model Context Protocol] servers and integrate them into LLM [large language model]-based agentic workflow.”

These models, Wright added, aren’t set in stone. Using Red Hat AI Inference Server, Lightspeed uses “different models. Some models were tuned right, some models are using RAG, and some implementations are using RAG. Each of those, like any other solution itself, is evolving.”

Red Hat has also upgraded its Red Hat Insights management platform with new AI-powered features. These include package recommendations and optimized planning tools that give you a comprehensive view of the RHEL roadmap, helping you make better decisions around system maintenance and upgrade planning. The AI-driven Insights Image Builder also now offers package suggestions tailored to specific tasks. This way, you can build the right RHEL images to match your needs.

Put together, Red Hat’s new AI system administration tools directly respond to the challenges enterprises face in managing increasingly distributed and complex Linux environments. By embedding AI into its support options, the company wants to deliver the best possible support system for all your workloads.