Release: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6

Last week open source giant Red Hat announced the availability of version 3.6 of its KVM-based virtualization platform Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).

While this new release provides the expected improvements from a technical standpoint adding things like:

  • 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.
  • PCI device assignment 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.
  • Host Update Manager: 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.
  • Object Health Status: Provides 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.

What catches our eyes is the newly integrated V2V tool aimed to simplify the migration from VMware to Red Hat’s platform.

With the level of maturity and adoption reached by virtualization market it’s obvious that most of the customers are looking for alternatives to VMware to run their workload or simply offer a different service tier to their users. In this scenario while Microsoft is a logic choice for many Microsft-centric companies, KVM/RHEV becomes an interesting alternative both cost and performance-wise.

  • Virtual machine-to-virtual machine (Virt-v2v) Integration: Enables customers 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 mission-critical Linux workloads without the pain of rip and replace.