Red Hat’s KVM-based virtualization solution, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6, is now available, offering 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.
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 include hotplug memory support which 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.
Another feature is PCI device assignment, which 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.
For security updates and risk management, the new version features a Host Update Manager which streamlines the patch release process across the virtualized environment through integration with Red Hat Satellite, a systems management solution.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 also 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
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6’s 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.
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.