Yesterday Red Hat has announced the global availability of version 3.4 of its Enterprise Virtualization: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV).
RHEV is based on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor and in this latest release introduced the support for the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 but especially an enhanced support for OpenStack, a technology where Red Hat is investing vigorously in this period, like the ability to import Glance (the OpenStack Image Service) images as templates to use them to deploy new virtual machines and the ability to create and delete networks on external Neutron (the OpenStack Networking Service) providers.
The main new features, introduced with a focus on enterprise customers, can be resumed as follows:
- Upgraded affinity/anti-affinity groups, enabling groups of virtual machines to run together on a single host or independently across alternative hosts to facilitate setting service levels for load-balanced applications;
- Template versioning, allowing users to easily update templates for minor revisions and to use a parent template when provisioning a new virtual machine, making it ideal for VM pools. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 also offers full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and earlier versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests;
- Enhanced networking through a multi-host network configuration, providing a simple mechanism to update and synchronize network configurations across a large number of hosts. This upgraded configuration also simplifies provisioning and management of a large number of Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) within an environment;
- New Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) notification service within the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4 infrastructure, enabling users to monitor the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization manager with preferred third party monitoring tools; and
- Mixed storage domains, enabling shared, different protocol types to exist within the same datacenter, including Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI); Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP); Network File System (NFS); Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) and Gluster.