Red Hat Advances Enterprise Virtualization Platform

Red Hat, Inc. announced advancements for its enterprise virtualization platform with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1.

The 3.1 release brings Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization forward with new features to enhance its scalability, user administration and management interface, networking, storage and virtual desktop functionality. This release also brings further flexibility for the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and the full Red Hat portfolio, including its Red Hat Storage and Enterprise Linux platforms.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a mission-critical end-to-end, open source virtualization infrastructure designed for enterprise users. The 3.0 release, which debuted in January 2012, marked a milestone, offering features, performance, scalability and cost advantages to enterprises. With the introduction of 3.1, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s Kernel-based VM (KVM) hypervisor holds 19 of the 27 published SPECvirt_sc2010 performance benchmarks, including the best 2-socket and 4-socket scores and the only published 8-socket scores. At 50 to 70% lower cost compared to alternative solutions, it can also offer organizations economic advantages.

3.1 Feature Additions
It incorporates several new features. For its main platform, 3.1 enables increased scalability of guest VMs, now providing support for up to 160 logical CPUs and up to 2TB memory, per VM, and updates its KVM hypervisor to support the x86 processors. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization shares the same base KVM hypervisor technology as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintains common ABI compatibility, enabling optimized flexibility for combining the two platforms from a single vendor.

3.1 also includes an updated user interface, improved cross-platform web administration portal, updated reporting dashboard, new networking capabilities and enhanced disk storage. The incorporation of a technology preview of storage live migration adds the flexibility to migrate VM disk files between storage domains without having to power down the VM. The power user portal has been enhanced with resource quota functionality to enable self-service for test/development and other private cloud use cases. The release also features advancements for the platform’s VDI capabilities, including a new virtual desktop autostart policy, improved WAN optimizations and an improved virtual desktop client.

3.1 also expands its localization enablement with support for English, French, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Japanese.

Red Hat Storage Integration
An addition to 3.1 is integration with Red Hat Storage, a scale-out, open source storage software solution for the management of data, including file and object, structured and unstructured. Based on the GlusterFS technology Red Hat received from its October 2011 acquisition of Gluster, Inc., Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 became available in June 2012, providing enterprise customers with open, unified scale-out storage software.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 provided the ability to access virtual images/storage over iSCSI, FC NFS or on local storage. With 3.1, the platform’s versatility is broadened, enabling it to access the secure, shared storage pool managed by Red Hat Storage. In addition to providing the essential building blocks for open hybrid clouds, this integration also offers enterprises reduced operational costs, expanded portability, choice of infrastructure, flexibility, scalability, availability and the power of community-driven innovation with the contributions of the open source oVirt and Gluster projects. The combination of these platforms is the first step toward Red Hat’s vision of an integrated and converged Red Hat Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization node that serves both compute and storage resources.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 is available to subscribing customers.

60-day trial (registration needed)

Paul Cormier, president, Product and Technologies at Red Hat, said: "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a key platform in the Red Hat portfolio that enables enterprises to leverage the power of the open source development model to drive innovation for virtualization. The 3.1 release is an important milestone for the product as it delivers key features and integrations that our customers are looking for. The integration of the product with Red Hat Storage, for example, brings virtual storage capabilities to enterprises that are not currently available in traditional virtualization solutions."

Robert Hurst, Caché Systems manager, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, said: "As early adopters of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we enjoyed our collaboration that included learning, adoption, migration and implementing a growing new set of Linux applications. And with KVM virtualization radically altering that landscape, it has become necessary for not only a reliable management tool, but also one that can work with our existing datacenter assets and supporting infrastructure. Our Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 pilot met that need with remarkably thin integration and allows us to expand provisioning and management of hosts beyond our systems engineering team."

Satinder Sethi, VP, Data Center Solutions, Cisco Systems Inc., said: "Red Hat continues to innovate in the open source community, and with the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, customers are offered important advances in open virtualization technology that will allow them to further drive operational efficiency and reduce costs to operate their datacenters. Together, Cisco and partners like Red Hat offer flexible and scalable capabilities for diverse datacenter workloads and their business needs."

Gerry Hackett, VP, Server Platform Engineering, Dell, Inc., said: "We’re pleased to continue evolving our relationship with Red Hat around virtualization and cloud computing. For those customers interested in open source, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a natural fit for Dell systems and enables us to provide compelling performance, scalability, flexibility and cost benefits to our joint customers. This goes a step further with the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 today."

Doug Fischer, VP and GM of Systems Software, Intel Corp., said: "Intel’s long-time commitment to open, standards-based solutions has consistently delivered top-notch performance and scalability in virtualized environments, with optimization for RAS capabilities and Intel Virtualization Technology. Organizations can look to the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization on Intel Xeon processor-based servers for benchmark performance to support their demanding mission-critical applications."

Maria Olson, head of Global Alliances, NetApp, Inc., said: "Red Hat and NetApp have collaborated for over a decade to bring greater performance, scalability and business agility to our joint customers. As a recognized leader in storage for virtual environments, NetApp is committed to working with industry leaders such as Red Hat to enable our customers to choose the best solutions for their environments. The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 and NetApp Data ONTAP, the world’s #1 storage operating system, delivers compelling benefits to organizations seeking open virtualization solutions."