Red Hat is offering partners and customers the chance to download a beta version of its upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 release, the next generation of the open-source software vendor's virtualization system.
While Red Hat has been previewing the beta software to a limited number of partners since August, this marks the first time the company has offered a preview to the general public.
Red Hat is pitching the 3.0 release as a lower cost alternative for Linux and Windows systems. It's built on the Kernal-based Virtual Machine, the open-source virtualization software managed by the Apache Software Foundation.
The new software can now be run as a Java application on Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the vendor said.
The 3.0 release offers a range of new management features, as well as scalability and performance enhancements. The system, for example, now has multilevel administrative capabilities for role-based access control and hierarchical management. A new reporting engine helps managers analyze usage trends and utilization reports. And a new portal lets users provision virtual machines and administer their own environments.
Red Hat also has updated the software's hypervisor to improve its host scalability, now supporting up to 160 cores and 2Tbyes of memory on a host system. And on the guest side 3.0 can now support up to 64 virtual CPUs per guest and 512 Gbytes of memory.
Red Hat's decision to move the KVM networking stack from userspace into the Linux kernel "greatly improves performance and reduces latency," according to the company. The hypervisor is more secure through the use of SELinux-based sVirt infrastructure. And developers and solution providers can take advantage of a new RESTful API to improve Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0's configuration and management capabilities.
