
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