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In late 2011, the oVirt project was established by founding member companies Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, Red Hat, and SUSE to create an open source community for the development of open virtualization platforms and more specifically, virtual management tools to manage the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor. With the oVirt project, the industry gains an open source, openly governed virtualization stack that offers optimized performance, scalability, security, and manageability benefits.

In the couple of months since the launch of the project, members of the community from around the world have been contributing to the project, driving toward the announcement of the availability of the first official release from the oVirt project with oVirt 3.0. oVirt 3.0 is an integrated virtualization platform that offers advanced virtualization management capabilities for hosts and guests, including high availability, live migration, and storage management.

The oVirt platform is anchored by oVirt Engine, a Java-based management server that serves the platform's web-based administration and user self-service portals, as well as its RESTful API. oVirt Engine teams with a small-footprint hypervisor, called oVirt Node, which features a text-based GUI for manageability and easy installation. The oVirt 3.0 release includes a Software Development Kit providing an enhanced Python environment to support the development of custom software utilizing the APIs exposed by the engine.

To help drive the oVirt platform forward, project leaders are continuing awareness and contributions to the project with community workshops around the world. The next open community workshop takes place in Beijing, China on March 21. Beijing is proving to be a center of increasing engineering activity around oVirt, both from board member companies such as Cisco, IBM, and Intel, and from individual community members. Sessions at the workshop will cover technical sub-projects, governance, how to get involved, usage, and more. For more information on the workshop, visit http://www.ovirt.org/news-and-events/workshop/.

oVirt 3.0 is available for download today at http://www.ovirt.org/get-ovirt/.