News

Red Hat Updates Enterprise Virtualization Platform

• By David Ramel
• 08/05/2020

Linux and open source stalwart Red Hat announced Red Hat Virtualization 4.4, the latest update to the company's enterprise virtualization platform for traditional virtual machine (VM)-based workloads.

Red Hat Virtualization virtualizes Linux and Windows workloads for improved performance, its site says, while providing a single virtualization platform to create, start, stop, pause, migrate, and template hundreds of VMs on hundreds of other hardware or software.

It can also be used to containerize VMs through integrations with Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat OpenShift virtualization.

The latter was announced earlier this year, addressing the cloud era with a core OpenShift capability designed to help organizations break down application barriers between traditional and cloud-native infrastructure and extend control over those distributed resources. That cloud focus continues with the v4.4 update. "As the established virtualization landscape shifts towards cloud-native technologies, Red Hat Virtualization has continued to provide the ability for businesses to deploy, configure and manage traditional workloads," the company said.

Seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift containerization software was also highlighted in the update announcement.

"Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 can now manage virtual machines in OpenShift through OpenShift Virtualization, helping customers modernize their deployments on a Kubernetes-first platform," the company said in an August 4, blog post announcing Red Hat Virtualization 4.4. "With the addition of full stack automation in Red Hat OpenShift 4.5, it is even easier to deploy an OpenShift cluster on existing Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 infrastructure."

In addition to being rebased to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 and offering a more seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift, other highlights of the new update include:

• New capabilities to ease the management of large virtual environments
• Improved observability with new dashboards for the Data Warehouse (DWH) showing performance and capacity of all critical inventory
• Improvements for virtualization admin including easier network configuration with NetworkManager

More detailed information is available in the release notes for Red Hat Virtualization 4.4, which the company said would be generally available this week.