Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3

Red Hat, Inc. announced the global availability of its Enterprise Virtualization 3.3, featuring expanded datacenter virtualization and management along with seamless workload scaling and integration.

Designed to deliver traditional datacenter virtualization while providing an on-ramp to OpenStack, Enterprise Virtualization enables a variety of enterprises to deploy traditional and elastic workloads on their existing infrastructure without impacting service levels, performance or scalability.

The new version enables customers to deploy a common set of OpenStack services (compute, storage and networking) that can be used by their datacenter virtualization platform through Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, as well as their private cloud through Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform. With a cohesive environment between the private cloud and the datacenter, enterprises may now deploy traditional and elastic workloads without having to duplicate infrastructure layers.

The new release of Enterprise Virtualization includes several enhanced infrastructure, networking and storage features to enhance developer portability across a heterogeneous cloud environment, including:

• A new self-hosted engine, allowing the Enterprise Virtualization manager to be deployed as a VM on the host, reducing hardware requirements;
• Backup and restore API integration, now including a new backup infrastructure providing an API set for third party software vendors to backup and restore their VMs; and
• Support for OpenStack Glance and OpenStack Neutron, enabling users to store their VM templates and enable advanced networking configurations with a shared infrastructure between private clouds and datacenter virtualization.

Supported, Updated and Integrated External Applications
In June 2013, Red Hat introduced a third-party plug-in framework for Enterprise Virtualization 3.2. With the plug-in framework, third parties can integrate new features and actions directly into the Enterprise Virtualization management user interface. Since the announcement, the below industry leaders have completed the development of their plug-ins.

These supported plug-ins include:

• Hewlett-Packard Development Ccompany, LP: The HP Insight Control Plug-in for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization provides actionable, valuable insight on underlying HP hardware. The plug-in simplifies operations, enhances reliability and minimizes downtime by enabling administrators to combine physical and virtual views within a single management platform;
• NetApp, Inc.: The NetApp Virtual Storage Console for RHEV enables rapid cloning of NetApp VMs, and allows NFS storage discovery, provisioning and modification from within Enterprise Virtualization Manager and
• Symantec Corp.: Symantec Veritas Cluster Server powered by Veritas provides automated DR functionality to keep applications up and running. It enables application specific fail-over and reduces recovery time by eliminating the need to restart applications in case of a failure.

Radhesh Balakrishnan, GM, virtualization and OpenStack, Red Hat, said: “Red Hat’s consistent improvements to the open KVM hypervisor and its concurrent virtualization management offerings now allow more customers to take control of their datacenters and build individualized paths to a private cloud infrastructure. With new additions to the third-party plug-ins offered by Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3, it offers a fundamental core for Red Hat’s OpenStack-powered cloud offerings.”

Scott Shaffer, director servers platform software, HP enterprise group, said: “The release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3 represents a significant step in open source virtualization that can easily and rapidly be deployed on HP’s ConvergedSystem for Virtualization for a balanced system supporting a variety of application environments. As a complementary solution, HP’s Insight Control for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization offers direct integration of the RHEV-M console with HP ProLiant, decreasing costs and datacenter complexity by providing a comprehensive view to manage and monitor both physical and virtual environments.”

Patrick Rogers, VP, data center platforms, NetApp, said: “As open source virtualization gains momentum, NetApp is looking forward to our continued collaboration with Red Hat to enable our customers’ success. The NetApp Virtual Storage Console for RHEV will drive streamlined operations between NetApp NFS and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager, enabling simplified discovery, provisioning, modification and rapid cloning.“

Doug Matthews, VP, information availability product management, Symantec, said: “The on-going availability of Symantec Cluster Server for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization continues our longstanding collaboration with Red Hat to offer enterprises of all sizes, trusted availability solutions for their applications and information. Through our collaboration, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3 customers can experience seamless automated DR, with better availability and performance for their business-critical applications.”

Silviu Popa, head of IT, Hidroconstructia, said: “Deploying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization allowed us to easily create snapshots of VMs, and move them seamlessly from testing to production environment while allowing us to keep focus on delivering our construction projects on time and within budget. The learning curve is shorter with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, and our platform has been stable for two years with no incidents since the initial deployment.“