News

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.3, Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 Now Out

Red Hat expands cloud-building lineup with two new OpenStack-ready releases.

• By Michael Domingo
• 01/22/2014

Red Hat continues to roll out the cloud technology, announcing a significant point release of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization suite and Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0. Both come with new features that tie in nicely with the open source OpenStack public/private cloud-building platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a KVM-based hypervisor. The 3.3 release expands on the feature set from the .2 release of six months ago. This time, it comes with a self-hosted engine that allows RHEV to be deployed as a VM on a host; a backup infrastructure via an API that allows third-party vendors to integrated business continuity solutions into VMs; and tighter integration with the Openstack platform. On the latter, RHEV 3.3 also has hooks directly into OpenStack Glance (for disk and server image management) and OpenStack Neutron (for network services management).

A new feature for RHEV 3.2 is the concept of plugins. Red Hat offered a framework to third-party developers to create plugins that allowed their products to tie into RHEV natively. With version 3.3, plugin contributions from HP (HP Insight Control), NetApp (NetApp Virtual Console), and Symantec (Veritas Cluster Server) are now fully operational and capable of deployment.

Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure 4.0 is an IaaS platform for on-premises and hosted virtualization as well as private and public cloud building, which can be built within the OpenStack framework. Cloud provisioning and orchestration is done via Red Hat CloudForms. According to a press release, the RHCI 4.0 refines the cloud-building process a bit further, with "tighter integration between its virtualization, cloud and platform components, enabling users to reduce image inconsistencies and duplications by only creating a single set of virtual images."

Radesh Balakrishnan, General Manager of Virtualization Business for Red Hat, made the announcements during a virtual event held earlier in the day. On-demand replays of the announcement and information sessions that followed can be viewed here (registration is free, but is required to view).