This week Red Hat announced that Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) 4.4 would be available. For those unfamiliar, Red Hat Virtualization is their enterprise virtualization platform that supports virtualization workloads, including resource-intensive and critical applications, using the KVM hypervisor.
This latest release runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.2, which is said to offer more seamless integration with Red Hat OpenShift.
OpenShift virtualization
One of the important items that caught my attention was more integration with OpenShift virtualization and combining or bridging cloud-native (containers) with traditional virtual machines. Which will standardize on single application development and management platform stack. You can deploy an OpenShift cluster on an RHV 4.4 system.
You see more and more of this, containers with virtual machines, and it will be interesting how this plays out over the next few years.
Red Hat has also improved observability with new dashboards for the Data Warehouse (DWH), showing the critical inventory’s performance and capacity. This leads to actionable results with unique analysis and trends of which workloads need attention, and when you need to add more hardware. Other improvements for virtualization admin include a more straightforward network configuration with NetworkManager.
Technology preview features
Some notable tech preview features to try out in this release;
- Incremental Backup – based on Changed Block Tracking (CBT)
- NoVNC console option – opening a VM console in the browser using HTML5
- Import Debian and Ubuntu virtual machines from VMware and RHEL 5 Xen
- oVirt Engine Backup – back up and restore RHV Manager with the Ansible
- SSO with OpenID Connect
- Cinderlib Integration
- Shared and local storage in the same data center
- Open vSwitch (OVS) cluster type support
- VDSM hook for nested virtualization
- Websocket proxy
Let me know what you think about the latest Red Hat Virtualization release and if you plan on upgrading to this version? Let me know on Twitter, and thanks for reading!