Red Hat today delivers a peek into the future of open source virtualization with the availability of the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 – the platform is expected to be generally available later this year. This is the first in a series of beta releases that will allow current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers to get access to up-and-coming features for the platform to provide feedback to Red Hat on the technologies and determine which technologies are good fits for their own infrastructure deployments. Current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers are able to access the beta via Red Hat Network today.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a comprehensive virtualization platform that delivers an open virtualization hypervisor with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and corresponding management tools for both server and desktop virtualization deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 was delivered to the market in January 2012, bringing leading features, performance, scalability and cost advantages to customers. The platform offers a strategic open virtualization alternative in comparison to competitive proprietary offerings.

With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, Red Hat brings its virtualization platform a step forward with many new features and updates available to current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers. New features in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 are planned over several betas in the series – key highlights of coming features include:

• 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!

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.

Visit the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization team at booth #208 onsite at the VMworld event in San Francisco August 26-30 to see a demo of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1.

Learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization at www.redhat.com/rhev.