Red Hat has launched Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6. This new version of Red Hat’s KVM-based virtualization solution 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.
Customized for large computing environments like SAP or Oracle deployments, as well as compute and graphic-intensive workstations, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization demonstrated a 36 percent performance advantage compared to other virtualization solutions in SPECvirt 2013 testing. The new PCI Device Assignment feature is designed to accelerate high-performance workloads, such as CAD/CAM. This enables a direct pass through of physical devices to virtual machines helping some customers to achieve near bare-metal performance for critical resources while reducing overhead of multiple, expensive workstations. Other advancements in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 build on Red Hat’s recognized leadership for scale, performance and cost-effectiveness of virtual machine workloads with these new features: Increased Performance and Scalability
- 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.
Security Updates & Risk Management
- 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.
Simplified VMware Migration
- 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.
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.
