News

Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 Aims to 'Improve Integration Across the Open Hybrid Cloud'

• By Wendy A. Hernandez
• 05/14/2018

With added disaster recovery capabilities, newer metrics and logging, and a streamlined UI -- plus a number of other enhanced and updated features -- today Red Hat Inc. announced the general availability of Red Hat Virtualization 4.2. In addition, a new version of its Red Hat Virtualization Suite, which consists of Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat CloudForms, is also available.

According the press release, the new enhancements to Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 include:

• "An easier-to-use and more intuitive" UI that looks and feels similar to other Red Hat solutions.
• The addition of Red Hat Ansible Playbooks and Roles to help "enable automated failover and failback of disaster recovery processes"
• The integration of Open Virtual Network to "deliver a native [software-defined networking] solution through Open vSwitch"
• Elasticsearch, Fluentd and Kibana (EFK)-powered visualization and real-time reporting capabilities
• An optional high-performance VM for "nearly bare metal speeds"
• The ability to support more compute-intensive apps and graphics with the use of NVIDIA virtual GPU solutions

"The cost and complexity of today's IT environment, coupled with the growing number of cloud native enterprise application environments, continues to be a challenge for many organizations," said Gary Chen, research manager of Software Defined Compute at IDC, in a prepared statement. "For organizations to find success in this market, they need a virtualization solution that can deliver a robust set of services for both traditional and new applications while delivering more operational efficiency."

Building on that efficiency factor is the expansion of Red Hat Virtualization's partner ecosystem, which, according to the announcement, includes "new integration capabilities driven by NVIDIA and Cisco."

Existing subscribers will be able to upgrade to Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 through the Red Hat Customer Portal, but the new KVM-powered virtualization platform is also available as a standalone offering, as part of Red Hat Cloud Suite or Red Hat Virtualization Suite, or as an integrated offering with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.