Red Hat preps next virtualization platform

Red Hat has released the first beta of its 3.1 virtualization server, the first major upgrade of its virtualiation platform since its debuted last January.

Last week, as V-leader VMware basked in the spotlight of its annual conference, Red Hat announced that it plans to release the upgraded KVM-based virtulization platform later this year.

The beta is available only ro existing customers.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 will offer support for enhanced scalability, including support for VMs with up to 160 virtual CPUs and 2 terabytes of RAM, new self-service capabilities, a browser independent web administration portal, new PV2 tools and support for new chipsets including AMD's Bulldozer CPUs and Intel's SandyBridge CPUs.

It will also feature significant new storage support, including storage live migration, hotplug and Direct LUN support and support for storing VM images on Red Hat Storage.

Version 3.1 will also offer new support for the Red Hat Directory Server, IBM Tovoli Directory Server and cluster-aware POSIX file systems, the company said.

Here's how Red Hat promoted the beta:

• Improved scalability supporting virtual machines with up to 160 virtual CPUs and 2TB RAM
• Quotas, extending the existing self-service capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 to allow administrators to define resource quotas for individual users and groups
• Browser independent Web Admin portal, now supporting French, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Spanish
• Storage Live Migration, allowing administrators to reduce down time and improve storage efficiency and utilization by dynamically moving virtual machine disk images between storage arrays without requiring any down time
• New P2V tools and capabilities, allowing customers to quickly migrate physical machines to virtual machines running on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization
• New virtual machine storage features including hotplug support and direct LUN access
• Support for new x86 chipsets, including AMD's Bulldozer family of CPUs and Intel SandyBridge
• Support for storing virtual machine images on Red Hat Storage, a software-only solution for scale-out NAS for datacenter and cloud environments
• Scriptability enhancements, including a new Linux CLI and Python SDK in addition to REST Platform updates to JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 6, OpenJDK 7 and JasperReports 4.7
• Support for Red Hat Directory Server and IBM Tivoli Directory Server, in addition to Red Hat Identity Management and Microsoft Active Directory
• New POSIX filesystem support extending Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s existing support for Fiber Channel, iSCSI, NFS and local storage to add support for any cluster-aware POSIX filesystem for including Red Hat Storage and IBM GPFS