Yesterday Red Hat announced the beta program of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform 2.2.
The company CEO hinted at this new update in the recent earning calls where he discussed about market opportunities against VMware.
Red Hat introduced the RHEV infrastructure in November 2009.
At that time only two components were unveiled: the Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor (REVH), a stripped down version of RHEL 5.4, and the Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Server (REVMS).
The missing piece, coming from the acquisition of Qumranet in September 2008, dubbed Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops (REVMD), arrives only now, in this new beta.
REVMD (formerly Qumranet Solid ICE) supports several features, including of course the Qumranet SPICE remoting protocol:
- Self-service provisioning
- Linked images
- Desktop pooling
- Virtual Desktops Auto suspend
- Support for 32bit color
- Support for streaming video: Users can view high quality streaming video on their virtual desktops
- Support for Multi-monitor display (up to 4)
- Support for bi-directional audio and video
- Support for USB redirection (up to USB 2.0 specifications)
- (a not better specified) WAN optimization
Interestingly, the virtual hardware support is limited to 4 vCPUs per virtual desktop, despite the hypervisor can support up to 16 vCPUs per VM.
Additional features introduced in RHEV 2.2 are:
- Support for Intel Xeon 5600 and AMD Opteron 6000 Series CPUs
The hypervisor now features the RHEL 5.5 kernel, introducing support for the just launched Intel Xeon 5600 (codename Nehalem-EX) and AMD Opteron 6000 (codename Magny-Cours) processors. - Support for up to 256GB vRAM per VM
- Support for OVF
For both import and export. It’s unclear if Red Hat already supports OVF specifications 1.1 published in January. - Virtual to Virtual (V2V)
The migration from a VMware or Xen virtual machine into a OVF file. This capability is currently limited to RHEL 3/4/5 guest OSes. Red Hat plans to extend to Windows guests in future releases. - Support for data warehouse analysis
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager now includes a data warehouse that collects monitoring data for hosts, virtual machines and storage, allowing customers to analyze their environment and create reports using any query tool that supports SQL.