Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Virtualization 4.1, the latest release of the company's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered enterprise virtualization platform. Providing an open source infrastructure and centralized management solution for virtualized servers and workstations and built on the enterprise-grade backbone of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Virtualization 4.1 delivers expanded automation capabilities through integration with Ansible by Red Hat while new networking and storage capabilities offer a stable, flexible foundation for IT innovation.

Red Hat Virtualization enables customers to virtualize traditional applications, which can reduce IT expenses through infrastructure consolidation and helps to integrate existing workloads with new technologies, like private cloud and container-based workloads. This means that enterprises can optimize current infrastructure while better addressing future IT needs, all without the cost, complexity, and lock-in of proprietary virtualization solutions.

A key enhancement to Red Hat Virtualization 4.1 is deeper integration with Red Hat's broad portfolio of open hybrid cloud technologies. This includes extended support for Red Hat CloudForms and Ansible by Red Hat, allowing for a single management interface across heterogeneous datacenter infrastructure and the automation of role-based administration and operational tasks. Tighter integration with Red Hat OpenStack Platform helps further bridge the gap between traditional and cloud-enabled workloads, and continued alignment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 delivers improved support for Windows-based workloads and hot CPU unplug support.

Additional new capabilities and enhancements in the latest version of the platform include:

• Improved automation with Ansible by Red Hat, making it possible for end users to automate Red Hat Virtualization platform using a variety of Ansible 2.3 modules that enhance virtual machines, storage, network, and more.
• Enhanced high availability without power management allowing virtual machines to be restarted even when power management fencing is not enabled or available, a feature that is key for multi-site clusters.
• Advanced storage performance and scaling, with the Storage Pool Manager (SPM) now able to delegate storage operations to other datacenter hosts, allowing common storage operations to run in parallel for higher throughput. Additionally, advanced single storage performance and improved block storage management help administrators to remove snapshots faster when a virtual machine is not in use and help reclaim storage space from within the virtual machine, respectively.
• Open Virtual Network (OVN) for Open vSwitch, available as a Tech Preview, provides software-defined networking (SDN) capabilities for enterprise deployments. OVN offers the ability to isolate overlay networking and subnet management in Red Hat Virtualization 4.1 for streamlined datacenter deployment and exposes an OpenStack Networking (Neutron)-compatible API to use with existing Neutron automation.

Availability
Red Hat Virtualization 4.1 is available now via the Red Hat Customer Portal.

"The vast majority of enterprise IT innovation is built on a virtualized foundation, making open virtualization technologies like Red Hat Virtualization vital as businesses look to save money while remaining nimble enough to address evolving end user and customer demands. Red Hat Virtualization 4.1 does this by linking a broad portfolio of technologies, from Linux containers to OpenStack-based hybrid clouds, into a unified stack, creating a crucial tool for digital transformation." -- Gunnar Hellekson, director, product management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat