News

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Gets Big Update

Version 3.4 adds several new ways to manage and provision VMs in large numbers, and adds some significant OpenStack features that simplify VM provisioning and networking in the cloud.

• By Michael Domingo
• 06/17/2014

Fresh on the heels of the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, the company today released Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.4. The release is a part of the Red Hat Cloud Infrastructure, from which both new products can be managed and deployed.

RHEV 3.4 is an update, and as such it comes with a few new features that the company deemed important enough to warrant a point release. A press release issued by the company offers the following:

1. Upgraded affinity/anti-affinity groups. The idea here is that one can run a number of VMs on one host or run them in tandem on independently running hosts. That way, those VMs can run at service levels that users expect.
2. Template versioning. Templates can be easily updated by users who want to make incremental changes to a VM. As well, a parent template can be created, then used to provision VMs en masse.
3. Enhanced network through multi-host network configuration. This feature allows updating and synching of large numbers of hosts, which also simplifies VLAN provisioning and management.
4. Simple Network Management Protocol notification service. A new feature, it allows monitoring of RHEV manager via third-party tools.
5. Mixed storage domains. RHEV 3.4 now can work within mixed storage protocols, whether it's iSCSI, Fiber Channel, NFS, POSIX, or Gluster.

This version also integrates a few OpenStack-related features that users can check out, which works something like a test drive without the company calling these features out as beta or in-development type of features. Specifically, OpenStack Image Service enhancements allow "users to import a Glance image as a template" that can then be used to provision a new VM based on that template, and OpenStack Networking Integration enhancements have been added to allow users to put up and shut down networks on external Neutron providers.