Making it easy to manage virtualisation

OPEN-SOURCE solutions provider Red Hat has rolled out the latest version of its Enterprise Virtualisation (RHEV) 3.0 product.

It is designed to meet the demands of cloud computing, create a secure, scalable environment for the sharing of resources, and make it easier to manage all of these.

Red Hat global community and technology architect Harish Pillay said past reluctance by businesses to embrace virtualisation was due to cost concerns. But the increasing affordability of the technology — coupled with the continued crunch in information technology budgets — has lead to a change of heart for many.

In order to stretch dollars, companies have had to find ways to maximise existing assets. “IT departments worldwide have to do more with less now, so virtualisation has become a powerful argument,” Pillay said.

According to him, virtualisation for most businesses is an evolving process of achieving greater datacentre power and agility.

“It’s not going to be a revolutionary process but an evolutionary one for the transition to virtualisation and cloud computing.

“It is still early days, with best practices still getting figured out,” he said.

RHEV 3.0 has expanded capabilities for both its server and desktop virtualisation management tools, and its Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor that enables multiple operating systems to run concurrently on a single computer.

Also, the management system is now a Java application running on the Jboss Enterprise Application Platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.