Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Delivers Strategic Virtualization Alternative

Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, with significantly expanded capabilities for both its server and desktop virtualization management tools and its Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.  With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, Red Hat provides a compelling open virtualization alternative to customers that offers exceptional performance, scalability, security, manageability and cost benefits.

"The virtualization market is getting more competitive every day, and IDC believes that over the next couple of years customers will be looking closely at alternative solutions to supplement and/or replace existing products," said Gary Chen, research manager, Cloud and Virtualization System Software at IDC. "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 is a major release, and a real turning point in the maturity of KVM. Red Hat has made a big commitment to virtualization and it shows with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0. IDC believes that this product deserves to be on customers’ short lists for evaluation."

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers was initially released in November 2009, followed by the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktops in mid 2010.  Since its debut, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product portfolio has enjoyed growing customer adoption and an expanding partner ecosystem.  Customers have expressed that they are looking for an alternative to proprietary solutions and are deploying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization in mission-critical production deployments.  In addition, approximately 50 percent of Red Hat’s largest customers, based on revenue, have begun deploying or piloting Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.1 Many are recognizing and executing on the trend of deploying dual-source virtualization strategies, with over 80 percent of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers deploying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as an alternative side-by-side with VMware2.

Open virtualization has achieved increased visibility in recent months through the Open Virtualization Alliance and oVirt project.  As a founding member of the Open Virtualization Alliance, Red Hat has worked closely with leading IT vendors across the industry to foster the adoption of KVM-based solutions, ensuring that customers can choose from a wide range of virtualization products and services. Additionally, Red Hat is a lead sponsor of the industry-backed open source oVirt project, which has the goal of promoting the development of open source virtualization management technologies.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 brings a balance of new enterprise virtualization management features, performance and scalability for both Linux and Windows workloads, at a lower cost than proprietary alternatives.3  With its open source hypervisor and virtualization management system, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers an interoperable solution without lock-in to proprietary platforms.  Red Hat has established itself as an industry leader in virtualization performance, holding all of the top five current SPECvirt_sc2010 results (www.spec.org), including the best 2-socket, 4-socket and 8-socket results.  Similarly, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization leads the industry in scalability metrics for VM density and hosts per cluster.  These leading performance and scalability benefits also come at prices one third to one fifth of the cost of alternative proprietary offerings.4

With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, the management system is now a Java application running on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It provides over 1,000 new features, enhancements and improvements, such as a power user portal for self-service provisioning, RESTful API, local storage and more. Offering a reliable and versatile foundation for cloud platforms, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 is designed to meet the heavy demands of the cloud and create a secure, scalable environment for sharing resources and for managing them simply and flexibly.

“Highlighting once again the benefits of the open source development model, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 offers enterprises around the world a true strategic alternative to incumbent proprietary solutions,” said Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies at Red Hat.  “We’ve heard from companies around the world that they have a need for an alternative to VMware and, with 3.0, Red Hat is providing an attractive offering that combines leading performance and scalability with compelling economics.”

"Red Hat is taking a major step into the cloud and virtualization market, and we believe that the BMC/Red Hat joint initiative to bring customers choice and expand their options is complementary to this effort. BMC plans to support Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 in the near future, enabling our joint customers to leverage the best technology of both companies," said Kia Behnia, BMC's CTO.  "Red Hat and BMC give customers the choice they need to make the cloud a reality."

“Cisco and Red Hat have been working together to develop solutions that ease the management of the virtualized data center.  Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 now offers integration with Cisco’s industry-leading Virtual Machine Fabric Extender (VM-FEX) technology, which enables customers to easily collapse virtual and physical networking into a single infrastructure for greater automation and simplification of the virtualized data center,” said Satinder Sethi, vice president, Data Center Solutions, Server, Access and Virtualization Technology Group for Cisco.

"Fujitsu welcomes the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, which will enable our customers to run optimized virtualization environments on Fujitsu's PRIMEQUEST and PRIMERGY servers. With this release, we expect that the trend of KVM-based open virtualization will accelerate," said Kazuto Fujioka, general manager, Linux Development Division at Fujitsu. "Fujitsu has contributed to KVM development through the open source community, so as to continue to offer optimized virtualization solutions to our customers with Red Hat.”

“Hitachi welcomes the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0. With this release, we expect Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 will address customers' needs, such as expandability and flexibility for cloud infrastructure, and also accelerate the adoption of open source software in the market,” said Susumu Okuhara, general manager of Platform Software at Hitachi, Ltd., Software Division.

“High-performance virtualization solutions give organizations increased flexibility to quickly address changing enterprise requirements," said Doug Oathout, vice president, Strategy and Alliances, Converged Infrastructure at HP. "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 on HP BladeSystem and HP ProLiant servers is a secure, automated and high-performance virtualization solution that delivers a responsive IT environment for achieving organizational innovation and competitive advantage.”

"Enterprises today expect scalable performance and manageability from their virtualization infrastructure,” said Doug Fisher, vice president and general manager of the Systems Software Division at Intel. “Intel’s long-standing investments in optimizing KVM for Intel architecture demonstrates our commitment to accelerate innovation through open source. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 running on Intel® Xeon® processor-based servers offers a robust open virtualization solution based on KVM, taking full advantage of Intel® Virtualization Technologies and the SRIOV (Single Root I/O Virtualization) standard.”

"We welcome the announcement of the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, which will strengthen operability on the virtualization environment," said Kotetsu Omiya, general manager of 1st IT Software Division at NEC Corporation. “NEC is offering Express5800 series with virtualization platform including KVM and will provide a virtualization environment and cloud platform that is well-suited for customer systems.”

“NetApp is continuing to innovate to help customers simplify enterprise data management and reduce total cost of ownership through its collaboration with Red Hat,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president, Solutions and Integrations Group at NetApp. “Working together, NetApp and Red Hat provide our mutual customers a cost-effective solution that combines Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 with NetApp® Data ONTAP® to help customers achieve greater performance, scalability and business agility.”

“SGI customers already benefit from the flexible, scalable performance in a virtualized workflow achieved with KVM running on our leading-scale SGI® UV platform,” said Christian Tanasescu, vice president of Software Engineering at SGI. “SGI believes Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 is an important step toward making the KVM virtualization solution easier to configure and manage for these users, in addition to supporting the scalability that demanding workloads require.”

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, including a full list of new features and capabilities, or to download a free, fully supported 60-day trial of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, visit www.redhat.com/rhev3.

To learn more about this announcement and to hear from Red Hat executives, partners and customers about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, join us for our virtual launch event keynote and following presentations kicking off at 12 p.m. ET on Wednesday, January 18.  The keynote and presentations will also be available on demand following the live event.  Join by visiting http://bit.ly/AxCJav.

For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com.  For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.


About Red Hat, Inc.
Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions and an S&P 500 company, is headquartered in Raleigh, NC with more than 70 offices spanning the globe. Red Hat provides high-quality, affordable technology with its operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, together with cloud, virtualization, management, storage and service-oriented architecture (SOA) solutions, including Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and JBoss Enterprise Middleware. Red Hat also offers support, training and consulting services to its customers worldwide. Learn more: http://www.redhat.com.

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