Red Hat Delivers Third Beta for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, Including Access to Red Hat Storage Integration

Red Hat continues its march toward the delivery of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 platform, expected to be generally available later this year, with today’s availability of the platform’s third and final beta. The first beta for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 was made available to customers in late August, followed by the availability of the platform’s second beta in September. Continuing to build on feedback provided by current customers and partners that are evaluating the beta, the third beta delivers additional improvements and new features. All subscribing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers have access to the beta via Red Hat Network.

In advance of general availability, the third beta is equipped with all of the features that we anticipate incorporating into the GA version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1. This includes full access to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 integration with Red Hat Storage, delivering enhanced levels of data protection and resiliency for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 through Red Hat Storage’s scale-out self-healing, synchronous and asynchronous replication capabilities. This includes the ability to deploy and manage Red Hat Storage from within the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager interface. It also means that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization now supports Red Hat Storage as a storage domain and adds a new storage management interface to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager that allows a unified single point of management for the virtualization platform and the storage infrastructure.

Integrating virtualization and data is a "must have" as organizations start to define and build open, hybrid clouds. Now, for the first time ever, we’re offering this, thanks to the community-driven innovation brought forth by the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat Storage. This integrated approach not only streamlines IT operations, but more importantly provides compelling flexibility without compromising on service levels or cost.

Another significant addition to Beta 3 is storage live migration, allowing the flexibility to migrate virtual machine disk files between storage domains without having to power down the virtual machine.

Other highlighted Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 features, delivered over the course of the three betas, include:

• improved scalability supporting virtual machines with up to 160 virtual CPUs and 2TB RAM;

• quotas, extending the existing self-service capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 to allow administrators to define resource quotas for individual users and groups;

• browser-independent Web Admin portal, now supporting French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Spanish;

• new P2V tools and capabilities, allowing customers to quickly migrate physical machines to virtual machines running on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization;

• new virtual machine storage features including hotplug support and direct LUN access;

• support for new x86 chipsets, including AMD's Bulldozer family of CPUs and Intel SandyBridge;

• support for storing virtual machine images on Red Hat Storage, an open software-only solution for scale-out NAS for datacenter and cloud environments;

• scriptability enhancements, including a new Linux CLI and Python SDK in addition to REST Platform updates to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, OpenJDK 7 and JasperReports 4.7;

• support for Red Hat Directory Server and IBM Tivoli Directory Server, in addition to Red Hat Identity Management and Microsoft Active Directory; and

• new POSIX filesystem support extending Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s existing support for Fiber Channel, iSCSI, NFS and local storage to add support for cluster-aware POSIX filesystems for including Red Hat Storage and IBM GPFS.

To download a fully supported trial of the shipping version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, visit www.redhat.com/rhev3. The 3.1 beta is open to existing customers only.

Learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization at www.redhat.com/rhev.