Red Hat has announced the availability of the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 3.1.
Current Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation customers are able to access the beta via the Red Hat Network today. The platform is expected to be generally available later this year.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation delivers an open virtualisation hypervisor with kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) and corresponding management tools for both server and desktop virtualisation deployments.
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 3.0 was launched in January 2012. New features in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 3.1 are planned over several different betas.
They include improved scalability supporting virtual machines with up to 160 virtual CPUs and 2TB RAM, and extending the existing self-service capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation 3.0 to allow administrators to define resource quotas for individual users and groups.
The Storage Live Migration feature allows administrators to reduce downtime and improve storage efficiency and utilisation by dynamically moving virtual machine disk images between storage arrays without requiring any downtime. And new P2V tools and capabilities allow customers to quickly migrate physical machines to virtual machines running on Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation. There are a host of other new features too.
Red Hat plans to release an enterprise grade version of the OpenStack open source software for hosting IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) deployments. The company posted an unsupported preview edition of the package last month, ahead of its full commercial release expected in early 2013.
