Red Hat Upgrades Virtualization Platform
The prolific developers at Red Hat have been relatively quiet in the New Year. Now, the open source leader is picking up the pace with the introduction of the latest version of its enterprise virtualization tool.
The company announced general availability this week of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 aiming to offer tighter integration with OpenStack while promising to ease deployment of IT infrastructures for traditional virtualization workloads along with enterprise-level cloud infrastructure.
Red Hat said the latest version of its virtualization platform handles production workloads while providing greater visibility into the provisioning, configuration and monitoring of virtual machine infrastructure.
Version 3.5 is intended to boost the scale and performance of virtual machine workloads with support for 4 TB of memory per host along with 4 TB of virtual RAM and 160 virtual CPUs per virtual machine, the company said February 11.
Along with management and provision of bare-metal hosts via Red Hat Satellite, the new virtualization platform is designed to optimize computing resources. Workload performance and scaling are provided via non-uniform memory access designed to help deploy scalable workloads without overtaxing physical memory access times.
Support is also included for migrating storage domains among different datacenters running Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), thereby improving disaster recovery capabilities.
Red Hat also touted the virtualization platform's tight coupling with OpenStack as a basis for both traditional virtualization as well as more flexible cloud-enabled workloads. Features targeting cloud workloads include integration and shared services with OpenStack's Glance image and its Neutron networking services. Both are available in a technology preview.
OpenStack integration also addresses instance types, thereby unifying the process of provisioning virtual machines for both virtual and cloud workloads, the company said.
Red Hat said Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 is available either as a standalone or integrated offering as well as via its own cloud infrastructure. The standalone version includes a hypervisor and a manager for virtual enterprise workloads running on supported "guest" operating systems.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Smart Virtualization, the integrated version, targets users seeking to leverage virtual infrastructures running Linux-based workloads. The option is touted as combining the benefits of RHEL with RHEV.
The third option delivered via Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure targets enterprises transitioning from traditional datacenter virtualization to OpenStack-based cloud infrastructure. The comprehensive infrastructure option is available as a single subscription that includes Red Hat CloudForms, Satellite, the RHEL OpenStack platform and RHEV.
Red Hat said it is betting that more enterprises will target "bimodal IT" in their virtualized and cloud infrastructure, prompting it to offer a RHEV as a component of an IT infrastructure needed to handle enterprise virtualization while extending the infrastructure needed to run workloads in the cloud.
