Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 Beta is Live!

We are pleased to announce the beta availability of Red Hat Virtualization 4.2, the latest version of our Red Hat Virtualization platform. Sixteen months into its lifecycle, Red Hat Virtualization continues to provide enterprises with a rich and stable foundation for both existing applications and a new generation of workloads and solutions.

The beta release of Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 includes a number of new and updated features to help organizations streamline and automate operations, improve the virtualization administrator experience, and mitigate risk in the environment.

While there are numerous new features and bug fixes, there is not enough room to list them all here. However, I would like to highlight a few of the additions that make the RHV 4.2 beta remarkable. Some of the new features that you should look forward to include:

Updated User Interface (UI) - When RHV 4.0 was released in August of 2016, it showcased the new dashboard tab as not only a new way of viewing essential resource utilization within RHV but how virtualization administrators will interact with RHV  in the future. The RHV 4.2 beta has made significant strides in furthering those UI updates.

Disaster Recovery (DR) - This is a native site-to-site failover solution. Instead of an integration with a specific storage vendor, it depends on storage at both sites that can be replicated reliably and consistently. Under the covers, Ansible is used extensively to automate the failover and failback process.

Software Defined Networking (SDN) - Open Virtual Network (OVN) has been integrated with Red Hat Virtualization to deliver a native SDN solution, via Open vSwitch. It provides automated management of network infrastructure, a Neutron compatible API for external network providers, as well as network self-service for users, freeing up network administrators from infrastructure requests.

Metrics and Logging - The new metrics and logging solution is built around the Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana (EFK) stack; the same stack as used by Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. The new metrics store provides much more functionality and details on the RHV environment than what was previously available.

High Performance Virtual Machine (VM) - The RHV 4.2 beta release provides a new virtual machine type called High Performance when configuring VMs. It is capable of running a VM with the highest possible performance; as close to bare metal as possible. This greatly streamlines the process of configuring the characteristics of a virtual machine over the previous manual only methods.

Support for Ceph via iSCSI - The Ceph iSCSI target has been tested and certified as a storage domain for virtual machines. This provides more infrastructure and deployment choices for engineers and architects.

Cisco ACI Integration - Cisco ACI provides overlay protocols that support both physical and virtual hosts in the same logical network even while running Layer 3 routing. This integration provides additional options for customers, especially those that utilize Cisco ACI as part of their infrastructure.

Many thanks to the engineers, product managers, project managers, writers, and everyone else that contributed to the delivery of this release!

For additional information on the Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 beta release, see the following links:

• RHV 4.2 Beta documentation can be found:
  https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_virtualization/
• To download the Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 beta, see the following link:
  https://access.redhat.com/downloads/content/150/ver=4/rhel---7/4.2%20Beta/x86_64/product-software

Hope this helps,

Captain KVM