Last month during the VMworld conference in San Francisco, we announced the availability of the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, our next server and desktop management platform version that is expected to be generally available later this year. Today, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 enters into its second beta, including updates based on feedback provided by current Red Hat customers after taking beta 1 for a test drive. Current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers are able to get access to the second beta of the platform via Red Hat Network today.

The list of highlighted features to be delivered over the course of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1’s combined three betas includes:

• 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
• Storage Live Migration, allowing administrators to reduce down time and improve storage efficiency and utilization by dynamically moving virtual machine disk images between storage arrays without requiring any down time
• 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, a 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
• New POSIX filesystem support extending Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s existing support for Fiber Channel, iSCSI, NFS and local storage to add support for any cluster-aware POSIX filesystem for including Red Hat Storage and IBM GPFS
• And much more!

Look for the third and final beta for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 coming soon!

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.