Downloadable Version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 Beta Now Available to All

In August, we announced the availability of the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, the next generation of our end-to-end virtualization solution.  Since then, we’ve been working closely together with beta customers and partners to test and optimize the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 technology to ready it for general availability.  Today, we are excited to offer the first glimpse into our advanced virtualization product to the general public – all customers, partners, community members and other interested parties – with the availability of our downloadable public evaluation (www.redhat.com/rhev3) version of the beta.  We encourage you to take a look at Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to check out our new features and functionality, and we hope you’ll provide us with feedback via the evaluation site too.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 offers a balance of enterprise virtualization management features, performance and scalability for Linux and Windows workloads at a significantly lower cost than the alternatives.  It is based on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, which brings to the solution the strong performance evidenced in recent leading SPECvirt benchmarks and the security it inherits from the Linux kernel.  KVM benefits from the expanding presence of the Open Virtualization Alliance, a consortium established by Red Hat and other industry leaders to foster the adoption of open virtualization alternatives, such as KVM.  

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s management technologies have also recently been open sourced through the oVirt project, an open source virtualization project providing a feature-rich virtualization management system focused on managing the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.  With the oVirt project the industry gains the first open source, openly governed virtualization stack.

In recent months, we’ve also made several announcements regarding new customers leveraging Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for their strategic virtualization implementations.  Read stories about how Salsa Labs, ADW, Duke, DreamWorks, Specsavers and the Finnish City of Kankaanpää are using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 includes updates such as:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager is now a Java application running on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
• A power user portal that provides end users with a self-service interface to provision virtual machines, define templates and administer their own environments
• A RESTful API that allows complete configuration and management of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for use by customers or a rich ecosystem of management partners
• Extended multi-level administrative capabilities, allowing fine-grained resource control, Role Based Access control, delegation and hierarchical management
• New local storage capabilities
• An integrated and embedded reporting engine allowing for analysis of historic usage trends and utilization reports
• SPICE WAN optimization and enhanced performance including dynamic compression and automatic tuning of desktop effects and color depth. The new version of SPICE also features enhanced support for Linux desktops.
• An updated KVM hypervisor with new capabilities focused around scalability, performance and security, such as:

       Host Scalability:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization now supports up to 160 cores and 2TB of memory on a host system. This allows customers to get better consolidation ratios running several hundred VMs on a given host.

       Guest Scalability:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization can now support up to 64 virtual CPUs per guest, up to twice that of some competitors, allowing even larger workloads to be virtualized.
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization now supports 512GB.

      Performance:

• vhost-net: We have moved the KVM networking stack from userspace into the Linux kernel, which greatly improves performance and reduces latency.
• Transparant Huge Pages: New feature where the Linux kernel dynamically creates large memory pages (2MB -vs- 4KB) for virtual machines, improving performance by reducing the number of times that memory is accessed, typically improving performance for most workloads.
• x2paic: Paravirtualized interrupt controller in the VM, which reduces guest overhead and can improve guest performance in interrupt-heavy workloads.
• Async-IO: For block I/O operations, in many cases yielding notable improvement in block I/O.

     Security

• Use of SELinux-based sVirt infrastructure for military-grade hardening of the hypervisor.

To access a downloadable version of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 to check out these new features, visit here (www.redhat.com/rhev3).

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