I had the opportunity to see a preview of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.
So far I am impressed. It looks like it’s going to be a great product. It got most of the features that you expect from an enterprise solutions. I would say that the product is behind VMware in terms of functionality but that it’s on par with Hyper-V and XenServer.
Here are what I think are the strongest points :
- Up to 16 virtual cpu (8 with vSphere)
- Support all the hardware that is supported in Red Hat, wich means that you can run on it on pretty much anything.
- I should be very fast, near native performance as it uses KVM.
On the other hand, here are some of the weaks points :
- No support for snapshot of live virtual machines. That’s it, you have to shut down the VM to take a snapshot.
- You need a Windows 2003 to run the server for the web-based administration console . You read it right, a Red Hat solutions that require a Windows server. Remember that RHEV come from the aquisation of Qumranet.com and the Windows requirement is a leftover from the original product. They should make it available on Linux on a future release.
- No P2V tools.
Heres are some of the others features that you could be interested in :
- It can save memory that same way Transparent Pages sharing does.
- an HA equivalent.
- a DRS equivalent.
- a DPM equivalent.
- Resources pools.
- Templates.
- Thin provisioning.
- NFS,ISCSI, Fibre Channel Storage.
- Live migration (like vMotion).
- The admin console is web based.
Red Hat should release RHVE in the upcoming weeks. The pricing is also not available yet.
Will RHEV have an impact on the virtualization market ? I don’t think it will have an immediate impact upon it’s release. It will take some time to earn the trust of the customer but with time it should be able to take a share of the virtualization market.
What do you guys think ? Will customer adopt this new platform ?
