Please Welcome Red Hat Virtualization 4.2!

Hi folks, it is now official - Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 (RHV) has been released! This is a huge milestone for the RHV team as 4.2 delivers more in the themes of ease-of-use, automation, and continued tighter integration with the Red Hat portfolio. As many of you know we have been working on this for awhile -

with upstream and downstream activities and contributions. Also we have been in active beta since December 2017. So let's take a quick look at a few cool things focusing on the 3 key themes from above:

Easy-to-Use:  You are going to see a new UI. For many of you it should look familiar - and that is what we want - the RHV 4.2 UI is based on the PatternFly engine that is used throughout the Red Hat portfolio. This is a very good thing as many of you are probably used to it already; it is really a fast performing UI; and it is it easy and intuitive to learn.

Automation: On the RHV team we are big, big  believers in Ansible. It’s an incredibly easy tool to learn to use and it drives major productivity improvements as we can easily create ‘playbooks’ to automate task after task. In RHV 4.2 we have heavily incorporated Ansible into our workflows. The slide below highlights some of our integration work.

Integration:  Closing out on our top three themes of focus in RHV 4.2 is integration. In 4.2 this is a broad category as it covers Red Hat portfolio integration; bundling opportunities; and new activity in our partner ecosystem. On the Red Hat portfolio side we continue to tighten our linkages to our core product peers: CloudForms, Satellite, OpenStack, and Gluster. All out of the box with new functions to better incorporate these products in the world of virtualization.

On the bundling side, we are introducing the Red Hat Virtualization Suite. This is a bundle of RHV and CloudForms. The bundle provides an easier path for people wanting to move to Red Hat Virtualization for their more traditional virtualization needs. Bringing management and some cost savings to the table add to the value of this offer.

We have had an active period in our partner ecosystem with 4.2 We will look at two partners here Cisco and Nvidia. “ACI loves KVM and Red Hat Virtualization” - hey, it is a Cisco quote! Cisco has created a reference architecture that helps to drive scalable virtualization for ACI and RHV 4.2 customer. Cisco’s excellent blog defines the opportunity we have here for Cisco ACI and Red hat customers. Red Hat and Nvidia have been working closely together to bring vGPU powered technical workstation support for AI, big data, and rich graphics use cases into RHV. This has been accomplished as Nvidia vGPU offerings are now supported. You can learn more about this via registering and watching this upcoming June 5 webinar

To close, we believe that RHV 4.2 creates your virtualization bridge to the modern data center. RHV 4.2 is the virtualization foundation for your organization. It affords support for your VM work flows. It helps drive improved ROI of your Red Hat investments with our integrations in Ansible, CloudForms, and OpenStack to name  just a few. Also, it begins a path to the future of virtualization and containers where Red Hat will surely be a leader - check our Red Hat's Lars Herrmann’s recent Red Hat Summit blog post on this topic - interesting reading!

Hope this helps,

Captain KVM