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Some days ago Red Hat has announced the availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 public beta. The first beta of RHEV 3.0 was announced in August, but was not available to the general public. You needed to have an active RHEV subscription at that time. The evaluation is immediately available to anyone with a Red Hat Network account.

About the new features and the improvements there is a specific page on RedHat site. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 includes updates such as:

  • Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager is now a Java application running on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Was silly that first versions of this products required a Windows Server to run.
  • A power user portal that provides end users with a self-service interface to provision virtual machines, define templates and administer their own environments.
  • Extended multi-level administrative capabilities, allowing fine-grained resource control, Role Based Access control, delegation and hierarchical management.
  • An integrated and embedded reporting engine allowing for analysis of historic usage trends and utilization reports.

So the features of the Virtualization Manager are now similar of the core features of VMware vCenter Server (from the first releases).

About the hypervisor layer, KVM introduce new capabilities focused around scalability, performance and security. With the limits described in the previous post, we can try to compare some hypervisor features between the RHEV beta and the current vSphere version:

RHEV 3.0
 vSphere 5.0
Max cores per host 160 cores 160 cores
Max RAM per host 2 TB 2 TB
Max vCPU per VM 64  vCPU 32 vCPU
Max vRAM per VM 512 GB 1 TB

Other hypervisor features:

  • Transparant Huge Pages: New feature where the Linux kernel dynamically creates large memory pages (2MB -vs- 4KB) for virtual machines, improving performance by reducing the number of times that memory is accessed, typically improving performance for most workloads. This feature exist in ESXi from several versions.
  • SELinux: because the KVM is a Linux kernel hypervisor, SELinux framework can be use to hardening the hypervisor.

On the performance side, some benchmarks (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization crushes the competition) try to demonstrate that the open source KVM hypervisor leads the industry in overall performance and scale-up as measured by the SPECvirt industry-standard virtualization benchmark.

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Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.