Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 now generally available

Red Hat, the global provider of open source solutions, has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6.

Lowering the costs and sprawl of proprietary virtualisation solutions is a common customer challenge addressed by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. The new version of Red Hat’s KVM-based virtualisation 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.

Customised for large computing environments like SAP or Oracle deployments, as well as compute and graphic-intensive workstations, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has demonstrated a 36% performance advantage compared to other virtualisation 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 passthrough of physical devices to virtual machines, helping some customers to achieve near bare-metal performance for critical resources while reducing overhead of expensive workstations.

New features include:

Increased performance

· Hotplug memory support works 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 adapter or device to a virtual machine, allowing for near bare-metal performance for graphics and networking-intensive computing.

Security updates 

· Host update manager: Streamlines the patch release process across the virtualised environment 

· 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. 

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 to migrate the workload. This migration strategy can lower the total cost of virtualisation and improve performance of mission-critical Linux workloads.

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.

Gunnar Hellekson, Director of Product Management, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Atomic, Red Hat said, “Red Hat has enhanced its virtualization platform offering to provide benefits for organisations moving towards the bimodal IT model. The simplified workload migration introduced in this newest release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization enables users to combine existing investments and move away from a fully proprietary virtualisation platform to implement a multi-hypervisor strategy.”

Wing Lee, Chief Executive Officer, YTL Communications added, "Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has provided the flexibility we need to offer a highly reliable and scalable cloud and 4G service in Malaysia. As the flag-bearer of nationwide 4G service in Malaysia, we expect that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization will continue to enable us to deliver unparalleled experience to our customers as we embark on exciting new 4G services to help the country progress and to close the digital divide.”

Interested?

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 is available as a standalone offering, as an integrated offering with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and as part of a comprehensive solution called Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure. Existing subscribers can upgrade to version Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 through the Red Hat Customer Portal.

*SPEC, All SPECvirt_sc2013 Results Published by SPEC, February 10, 2016.