Red Hat announced this week general availability of its KVM-based virtualization offering Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 that offers increased performance, scale, and security for high-intensity Linux workloads. It also updates user experience and management tools to help reduce cost and time of VMware migrations by eliminating the need to purchase a third-party migration tool.
Lowering the costs and sprawl of proprietary virtualization solutions is a common customer challenge addressed by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
Building on previous releases, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 provides the infrastructure layer for customers to move their workloads to containers or the cloud. It also integrates with Red Hat’s hybrid cloud management platform, Red Hat CloudForms, to manage heterogeneous environments across multiple clouds, hypervisors, containers, and traditional computing infrastructure.
This version of Red Hat’s KVM-based virtualization solution brings improvements for high-intensity Linux workloads, including increased performance and scalability, security and risk management and simplified VMware migration. The release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 also brings integration with Red Hat CloudForms to manage heterogeneous environments across multiple clouds and hypervisors.
Other features of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 include increased performance and scalability with hotplug memory support provides dynamic, one-click memory scaling, working with underlying infrastructure to give an application more memory “on the fly” while avoiding disruption to the application runtime. It also gives PCI device assignment that enables administrators to directly assign a physical adaptor or device to a virtual machine, allowing for near bare-metal performance for graphics and networking-intensive computing.
The offering alo includes host update manager that streamlines the patch release process across the virtualized environment through integration with Red Hat Satellite, a systems management solution used by half of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers. Its Object Health Status gives visibility into external system health events, such as issues with storage, CPU, server or hard-drive performance, via the Red Hat Enterprise VIrtualization interface. This feature alerts admins to events that may cause downtime or negatively impact virtual machine performance, so they can proactively manage risk and potential downtime.
Through simplified VMware migration, the new offering gives virtual machine-to-virtual machine (Virt-v2v) integration that allows users to identify critical Linux workloads to move to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization by connecting directly to vCenter and providing simple click-through steps to migrate the workload over. This select workload migration strategy can lower total cost of virtualization and improve performance of Linux workloads without the pain of rip and replace.
