Red Hat Announces Beta Availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2

It’s been four months since the November 2009 release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, our new virtualization product that includes a standalone hypervisor based on Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology and comprehensive server virtualization management tools. Since then, customers have been deploying Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a high-performance, scalable, reliable alternative to other products on the market.

Over the past four months we have seen customers moving Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization from proof-of-concept into development, test and production, running mission-critical workloads. One example is Voddler, an online entertainment company in Sweden that recently deployed Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as its standard virtualization platform, combined with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat Network Satellite. Deployments of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization have not been limited to in-house usage – it has also been selected as the foundation of public cloud offerings, which generally require an enterprise-strength product, by organizations such as NTT and IBM.

Today, we have released the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2, featuring a range of impressive new capabilities. The highlights of this release include:

Virtual desktop support
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 is designed to support both virtual server and virtual desktop environments from the same management platform.

Import and export
With the 2.2 beta release, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager can now import and export virtual machine images and templates using the industry-standard Open Virtualization Format (OVF). With this feature, customers can more easily move virtual machine images between environments, publish templates or simply create backups of their environment.

V2V : Virtual machine conversion
V2V is a tool designed to automate the conversion of VMware or Xen virtual machine images into an OVF file for use within Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. With V2V incorporated into the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 beta, customers are able to take Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, 4 or 5 virtual machines created in VMware or Xen environments and automatically convert them into Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization virtual machines. We expect V2V to be extended in a future beta release to support conversion of Windows XP, Windows 2003 and Windows 2008 virtual machines images.

Data warehouse
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager now includes a data warehouse that collects monitoring data for hosts, virtual machines and storage, allowing customers to analyze their environment and create reports using any query tool that supports SQL.

Performance
The maximum allowable memory for a virtual machine has been increased from 64GB to 256GB in the beta, which we believe should allow even the most memory-intensive enterprise workloads to be virtualized.

The hypervisor has also been updated to use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 kernel with the aim of allowing customers to take advantage of the latest hardware, such as the Intel Nehalem-EX and AMD Opteron (TM) 6000 Series platform (formerly code named “Magny-Cours”).

Today’s beta also features improved disk I/O performance for virtual machines using thin provisioning or snapshots to deliver performance within a few percent of raw/thick provisioned disks.

All current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization customers can download the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 2.2 beta via Red Hat Network today.