Last week, at the Red Hat Summit in Boston, Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) platform 2.2
The new version, in beta since March, introduces a number of new features. The most important one is the inclusion of the Qumranet technology to manage a KVM-based VDI environment, dubbed Red hat Enterprise Virtualization for Desktop.
Red Hat also announced that RHEV 2.2 is supported on the Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS), which means that now Red Hat has an additional playground to compete with VMware.
What’s new in details:
RHEVS
- 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.
RHEVD
- Support for 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