Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Virtualization 4.3, which is designed to provide enterprises with easier interoperability and integration across IT environments.
Virtualization 4.3 is integrated with the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat's Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-enabled virtualization platform. Red Hat Virtualization, which has been available for roughly 10 years, is an open software-defined platform for virtualizing Linux and Microsoft Windows workloads. It allows customers to more easily virtualize traditional workloads while also more easily scaling virtual machine workloads. Red Hat said its virtualization platform is building a foundation for future cloud-native and containerized workloads.
"We are continuing to evolve the product," said Rob Young, senior manager, cloud platforms product management at Red Hat. "There were some questions now that we are moving into the containerization space if our virtualization business would continue on. The answer there is absolutely yes.
"We are focusing on making sure that 4.3 is tightly integrated with our automation around Ansbile and with OpenStack and that the partner ecosystem that we're guiding right now is solid."
As a community-driven open source effort, Young said that 4.3 has benefited from the feedback and bug fixes from its various users, which includes customers and the KVM and open virtualization management platform (oVirt) communities.
"We've closed a lot of bugs," Young said. "There were almost 1,400 bugs and fixed from people who have an interest in this getting more solid and more stable. Its very stable and very reliable and because of that we're able to focus on ease of use and portfolio integration."
Red Hat expanded software-defined networking in 4.3 with support for the latest Red Hat OpenStack Platform, which includes versions 12, 13 and 14, and with OpenStack's Neutron project.
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While IBM's $43 billion deal to acquire Red Hat won't close until the second half of this year, the two companies are finding ways to collaborate. Red Hat Virtualization supports IBM's POWER8 and POWER9 architectures for running virtual machines in data centers.
With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 beta guest support on Red Hat Virtualization, users will now be able to run production workloads on the Linux operating systems in a virtualized environment with planned support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 when it's released.
Starting this month, Red Hat Virtualization 4.3 is available as a standalone offering, as an integrated offering with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and as part of Red Hat Cloud Suite or Red Hat Virtualization Suite.