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Red Hat's Virtualization Server 3 beta due this summer, to ship in late 2011

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers 3.0 will move into beta later this summer and ship later this year. Version 3 0 will rid the Linux company of an embarrassing requirement that users run the server on Windows
Written by Paula Rooney, Contributor

Red Hat is preparing to release a major upgrade of its KVM-based virtualization server -- the first without the strange Windows server requirement -- in late 2011, execs said at Red Hat Summit.

Chuck Dubuque, a Red Hat product marketing manager, said Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 is expected to move into beta testing later this summer.

The enhanced virtualization server will offer significant scalability and performance improvements over the existing RHEV for Servers 2.2 , such as support for 4,096 host cores, support for 64 terabytes of host memory, support for 32 or 64 guest CPUs, support for 1 terabyte of guest memory and support for 200 host clusters.

RHEV 2.2 today supports 192 host cores, one terabyte of host memory,  support for up to 16 guest CPUs, support for 256 gigabytes of guest memory and support for 100 hosts per cluster.  RHEV 2.2 --which introduced support for desktop virtualization -- was released last year. The first server shipped in 2009.

Red Hat once backed Xen as the open source hypervisor of choice but made a strategic decision to move to KVM after acquiring Qumranet in 2008. KVM is incorporated into the Linux kernel.

But perhaps the most significant improvement planned for RHEV 3.0 is the elimination of a requirement that users run RHEV on Windows, a painful legacy of the company's Qumranet acquisition, the Red Hat executive noted.

"We do require Windows to run the server component of RHEV today, legacy because we acquired Qumranet, and we've been working hard to get off of Windows and move to a full RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] and JBoss stack for the management server and get rid of the last dependency, and then move to the RHEL 6 hypervisor," Dubuque told a hundred or so gathered at a Red Hat Summit session on the future of Red Hat's virtualization.

The Red Hat exec said the company offers similar and in some cases better capabilities than VMware for one third of the cost, due to the lack of software licensing fees. He acknowledged that Red Hat continues to lag VMware in one category -- storage live motion -- but noted the company will likely have that feature available in the RHEL 6.2 update in 2012. RHEL 6.1 release candidate was announced at the summit this weej.

advtages  storage live migration,

 

256 GB

 

100 hosts per cluster

 

Late 2011

 

 

 

 

single root IO virtualization in KVM -- little piece of code can get 99 percent of PCI pass through.

 

Chuck Dubuque, Red Hatr

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