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Red Hat Virtualization 4.3 is at the starting gate

Containers may be red hot, and Kubernetes is white-hot, but you still need virtualization. And Red Hat delivers, with its latest KVM-based virtualization platform.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

At Open Infrastructure Summit in Denver, Red Hat announced that its latest virtualization platform, Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) 4.3, will be out in May.

RHV is the latest version of Red Hat's Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)-powered virtualization platform. KVM s a built-in Linux virtualization program for x86 with virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). Red Hat's take also supports IBM's POWER 9 hardware.

What's that? Do you still need virtualization, when containers and Kubernetes are all the rage? Yes. Yes, you do. As Joe Fernandes, Red Hat's VP of cloud platforms products, said in a statement, "Virtualization provides a foundation for modern computing and entry point for hybrid cloud deployments, making a flexible, stable and open virtualization platform a key piece of an enterprise technology."

This release tries to deliver greater security, easier interoperability, and improved integration across enterprise IT environments. It can be used for virtualizing both Linux and Microsoft Windows workloads.

Red Hat Virtualization 4.3 new capabilities and enhancements include:

  • Expanded software-defined networking (SDN): With support for the latest Red Hat OpenStack Platform (version 12, 13, and 14), RHV offers more flexibility and customer choice in SDN solutions, providing an open-technology stack that can more easily integrate with existing technologies to meet specific business needs.
  • Automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation: End-to-end automated configuration, deployment, and validation are made possible with Red Hat Ansible Automation. New roles include deployment of the Red Hat Virtualization Manager through Ansible, and creation and management of physical and logical resources such as hosts, clusters, and data centers.  
  • Modern enterprise Linux support: With Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 beta guest support on Red Hat Virtualization, users will run production workloads on Linux in a virtualized environment with planned support for RHEL 8 at its release. RHEL 8, which is now in beta, is expected to be released within the next month.

Using another virtualization platform? Red Hat will be more than happy to help you move from VMware to RHV with its Red Hat infrastructure migration solution.  

Want to kick RHV's tires? It will be available as a standalone offering, as an integrated offering with RHEL, and as part of Red Hat Cloud Suite or Red Hat Virtualization Suite. Existing subscribers can upgrade to Red Hat Virtualization 4.3 through the Red Hat Customer Portal.

Photos: From the first PCs to the ThinkPad – classic IBM machines

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