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Red Hat, the world’s largest independent open-source software maker, Dec. 5 updated its virtualization and cloud platforms so that they plug into each other, scale, network and handle storage more efficiently.
Strangely, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s previous KVM hypervisor iterations did not integrate directly with the company’s own Red Hat Storage server software. Workarounds always were required.
The new release, RHEV 3.1, solves that problem, thanks to the GlusterFS cloud-ready distributed storage system Red Hat obtained from its October 2011 acquisition of Gluster Inc.
CloudForms 1.1, Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud management platform, now includes updates and new language enablement.
The Cary, N.C.-based company also announced the cross-integration of two open hybrid cloud software packages — Red Hat Hybrid IaaS Solution and Red Hat Cloud with Virtualization Bundle — to offer enterprises what Red Hat calls “an easy on-ramp” to open hybrid cloud computing.
Key New Features in RHEV 3.1
RHEV 3.1 now offers increased scalability for guest virtual machines, provides support for up to 160 logical CPUs and up to 2TB of memory per virtual machine, and can update its KVM hypervisor to support the latest x86-type chips. It shares the same base KVM hypervisor technology as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintains common ABI compatibility.
RHEV 3.1 sports an updated user interface, an improved cross-platform Web administration portal, updated reporting dashboard, and new networking capabilities. The incorporation of a technology preview of storage live migration adds the flexibility to migrate virtual machine disk files between storage domains without having to power down the virtual machine, Stein said.
Finally, RHEV 3.1 also expands its localization enablement with support for English, French, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Japanese, enabling the platform to be used even more widely around the globe.
Red Hat positions its virtualization suite as the only end-to-end enterprise open source virtualization infrastructure on the market. The platform’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor currently holds 19 of the 27 published SPECvirt_sc2010 performance benchmarks, Red Hat Vice President of Cloud Computing Brian Stein said during a press conference webcast.
These include the best 2-socket and 4-socket scores and the only published 8-socket scores, he said.
Priced Below Competitors
Red Hat claims that it prices its virtualization platform 50 to 70 percent less than competitors such as VMware (ESX and vSphere) and Citrix XenServer.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 is globally available to Red Hat subscribers now. A fully supported, 60-day trial of the release is available here.