Open source software firm Red Hat has released the beta version of its Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, which moves virtual machine disk images between storage arrays without requiring to shut them down first, ahead of its scheduled general availability later this year.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) is a virtualisation platform that delivers an open virtualisation hypervisor with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and corresponding management tools for both server and desktop virtualisation deployments.
The company claims RHEV 3.1 beta supports virtual machines with up to 160 virtual CPUs and 2TB RAM, new x86 chipsets, Red Hat Directory Server, IBM Tivoli Directory Server in addition to Red Hat Identity Management and Microsoft Active Directory.
The new release features Quotas that extend the existing self-service capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0, to allow administrators to define resource quotas for individual users and groups and a browser independent Web Admin portal that supports French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Spanish.
The first beta for RHEV 3.1 includes new P2V tools and capabilities that allow customers to migrate physical machines to virtual machines running on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and new virtual machine storage features including hotplug support and direct LUN access.
It also includes scriptability enhancements and support for storing virtual machine images on Red Hat Storage, a software-only solution for scale-out NAS for datacenter and cloud environments.
In addition, the new POSIX filesystem support extends Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s existing support for Fiber Channel, iSCSI, NFS and local storage to add support for any cluster-aware POSIX filesystem for including Red Hat Storage and IBM GPFS.
