Red Hat launches its latest KVM virtualization platform

Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Virtualization 4, its latest Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) -powered virtualization platform.

Red Hat Virtualization 4 includes both a high-performing hypervisor, as well as a web-based virtualization resource manager for management of an enterprise’s virtualization infrastructure. The team claim the platform has been built with both legacy systems and emerging technologies including containers and cloud-native applications.

“Our customers continue to rely on virtualization as a vital part of their datacenter modernization efforts while also using it to help bridge to new cloud-native and container-based workloads,” said Gunnar Hellekson, Director of Product Management for Linux and Virtualization at Red Hat. “Red Hat Virtualization provides the economics, performance and agility needed across both traditional and new infrastructure initiatives.”

The platform itself will be marketed around several new features including enhanced performance and extensibility; the update will include a smaller footprint hypervisor, as well as new management features; an advanced system dashboard has been introduced to the offering. The team has also stated the offering will include support features for Linux container-based workloads as well as OpenStack private and hybrid cloud deployments.

“While virtualization remains a key underpinning for the modern data centre, customer needs are rapidly evolving to demand more than simply virtualizing traditional workloads,” said Gary Chen, Research Manager of Software Defined Compute at IDC. “Modern virtualization platforms need to address these standard scenarios while making way for the emergence of virtualized containers and cloud computing.”