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Saturday, August 27, 2011

RHEV 3.0 - it's in BETA and almost here!

Yes, that's right.  RHEV 3 is almost here.  It's currently in BETA.   Unfortunately, i've not yet been able to try it out directly, but i've done quite a bit of research into the underlying architecture and have been working with some of the upstream components for a little while now.

The press release reads as follows :

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Today’s Beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 previews several key enhancements, including:
  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager is now a Java application running on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • An updated KVM hypervisor based on the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
  • Industry-leading performance and scalability levels, supporting up to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB memory for hosts, and up to 64 vCPUs and 2TB memory for guests
  • A power user portal that allows end users to provision virtual machines, define templates and administer their own environments
  • A RESTful API that allows all aspects of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to be managed and configured programmatically
  • New multi-level administrative capabilities, improving product functionality for very large deployments
  • New local storage capabilities
  • An integrated and embedded reporting engine allowing for analysis of historic usage trends and utilization reports
  • SPICE WAN optimization and enhanced performance including dynamic compression and automatic tuning of desktop effects and color depth.  The new version of SPICE also features enhanced support for Linux desktops.



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It'll be interesting to see how it stacks up against the market leader - vSphere,  performance-wise the hypervisors are definitely on-par, with KVM actually performing a little better according to the specvirt benchmarks.

The 'secret sauce' in this market is the management tools and it's clear there has been some significant effort in this area with the RHEV-M re-platforming.  Hopefully this energy can be re-directed post conversion to increasing the functionality.

There are still some operational quirks in this release, though the installation now on rhel6 looks quite simple (yum install rhevm).  Unfortunately,  you still need a windows client running internet explorer to use the web gui.  I'm led to believe that this requirement for WPF finally disappears with 3.1 as it is replaced with a GWT functional equivalent.

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