Red Hat has just announced the availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 public beta. This release, open to all, brings an updated KVM hypervisor based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and scales to 128 logical CPUs and 2TB of memory for host machines.
With the latest beta, Red hat has updated its RHEV Manager application to a Java app running on JBoss. RHEV 3.0 now has a “power user portal” that allows users to provision VMs and define VM templates.
Another important addition to RHEV 3.0 is a RESTful API that can be used to manage and configure “all aspects” of RHEV 3.0. It also sports a new reporting engine for analysis of usage trends, and to produce utilization reports. For companies using RHEV as part of their virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), Red Hat has added some optimizations around WAN access that include better compression and automatic tuning for desktop color depth and effects.
The first beta of RHEV 3.0 was announced in August, but was not available to the general public. You needed to have an active RHEV subscription at that time. The evaluation is immediately available to anyone with a Red Hat Network account.
The installation and testing is a bit more complex than just slapping RHEL onto a server. To run the beta with the recommended evaluation, you’ll need to have a RHEV manager server, two or more hypervisor servers, and shared storage for the systems. You can run the eval with just a single manager server and a single hypervisor server with local storage, however. The download consists of a RHEL 6 ISO and the RHEV Hypervisor ISO.
If you’re getting started with RHEV, you might want to check out a series of posts by Red Hat’s Richard W.M. Jones. These were from August when RHEV was first released into beta, but should still prove useful. So, who’s downloading the beta tonight?
