Red Hat Virtualization

Red Hat® Virtualization is an easy-to-use software-defined platform for virtualized Linux® and Windows, built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and KVM technologies.

KVM is the industry-leading Linux virtualization technology for full-virtualization. It's a kernel module merged into the mainline Linux kernel and it runs with near native performance on all x86 hardware with virtualization support—either Intel VT-x or AMD-V.

RED HAT VIRTUALIZATION

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers is an end-to-end virtualization solution that is designed to enable pervasive dat-acenter virtualization, and unlock unprecedented capital and operational efficiency. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers builds upon the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform that is trusted by thousands of organizations around the world fortheir most mission-critical workloads, and consists:

•Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager: A feature-rich server virtualization management system that provides advanced capabilities for hosts and guests, including high availability, live migration, storage management, system scheduler, and more.

•Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor: A modern hypervisor based on KVM and the Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel.

Red Hat® Virtualization is a mature, reliable platform for traditional virtualization workloads built with the foundation to modernize your virtualization, your way. Backed by the powerful Red Hat Enterprise Linux®, Red Hat Virtualization provides ease of use, agility, and more security for virtualized, resource-intensive workloads.

With Red Hat Virtualization, you can:

  • Virtualize any Linux or Windows application.

  • Standardize compute, storage, and networking resources.

  • Improve workload performance, efficiency, and application density.

  • Deploy an agile environment to bring products to market faster.

  • Build a strategy to containerize your virtual machines with a bridge to Red Hat OpenShift® and OpenShift Virtualization.


EASY TO OPERATIONALIZE, EASY TO AUTOMATE, EASY ON THE BUDGET, NO VENDOR LOCK-IN

CENTRALIZED MANAGEMENT

Virtualized compute, network,and storage resources using theopen source KVM hypervisor

AUTOMATED WORKLOAD

Management, scalability,and security features forvirtualized applications

I.T. OPTIMIZATION

Integrates with future technologies using RESTful application programming interface (API)

Red Hat Virtualization Key Components

Component Name

Red Hat Virtualization Manager

Description

A service that provides a graphical user interface and a REST API to manage the resources in the environment. The Manager is installed on a physical or virtual machine running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Hosts

Red Hat Enterprise Linux hosts (RHEL hosts) and Red Hat Virtualization Hosts (image-based hypervisors) are the two supported types of host. Hosts use Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology and provide resources used to run virtual machines

Shared Storage

A storage service is used to store the data associated with virtual machines.

Data Warehouse

A service that collects configuration information and statistical data from the Manager.

Features and benefits

Red Hat Virtualization can be deployed using your existing infrastructure and easily integrates with other Red Hat products to bring modern applications to market faster.

Future

Benefit

Centralized management

  • Red Hat Virtualization Manager provides a centralized management system with a search-driven graphical user interface.

  • The system dashboard includes a global-use overview of CPUs, memory, storage host resources.

  • Manage and control virtual machines running in Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform directly from Red Hat Virtualization.

  • Red Hat Virtualization Manager, deployed and managed as an appliance, provides built-in high availability for the management plane.

Security and hardening

  • Secure virtualization (sVirt) and Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) technologies, both inherited from Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are incorporated to help secure and harden the hypervisor against attacks aimed at the host or virtual machines (VMs).

Highly available resources

  • VMs can be configured for high availability in case of host failure.

  • Hosts can be configured for power- and storage-based fencing for high availability.

  • Red Hat Virtualization fully supports third-party tools through a REST API that backs up, restores, and replicates VMs and infrastructure data.

Automation and integration

  • Integration with OpenShift Virtualization modernizes virtualized workloads to containers while maintaining visibility of VMs running in both Red Hat Virtualization and Red Hat OpenShift.

  • Red Hat Virtualization integrates with OpenStack® to ease traditional workload migration to private clouds or to design applications that span virtual and private cloud environments.

  • Integration with Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform streamlines administration and operations by configuring infrastructure and resources, such as hosts, VMs, networks, and storage.

  • Red Hat Virtualization natively supports Red Hat Gluster® Storage, and Gluster storage-node management is available through the Red Hat Virtualization administrator portal.

  • Host Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform or the Red Hat OpenStack Platform control plane on Red Hat Virtualization.

  • A RESTful API automates management and programming configurations.

  • Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) allows Red Hat Virtualization Manager to integrate with third-party monitoring systems.

Workload management

  • An advanced service-level agreement manager allows administrators to define host and VM policies for underlying infrastructure resources, which can also be used to guarantee service quality.

  • Additional memory and CPU resources can be added without disrupting applications.

  • A resource optimizer automatically balances existing VMs within a cluster.

Cross-platform support

  • Full support is provided for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 6 , 7, and 8.

  • Support is available for Windows Server 2008, 2008 R2, 2012 (32- and 64-bit), and 2016, as well as desktop systems Windows 7, 8, 8.1, and 10 (32- and 64-bit).

  • Vendor support is provided for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10, 11, and 12.

Migrate from other platforms

  • Determine migration effort and risk for modernizing VM workloads with Red Hat Migration and Modernization Solutions and consolidate workloads where they work best for your business—on VMs or containers.

  • Red Hat Virtualization Manager—or a command-line tool—can help migrate workloads from VMware vCenter to Red Hat Virtualization.

Enhancements in Red Hat Virtualization 4.3

THE FUTURE OF VIRTUALIZATION



TODAY AND TOMORROW

● Red Hat Virtualization

  • Today - enterprise virtualization workloads for traditional applications or any application which needs resiliency from the infrastructure

  • Tomorrow - continued reliability, scalability, and incremental improvements in capabilities to meet the needs of enterprise virtual machines

  • RHV is the mature, trusted platform for tier 1 application virtualization!

● Container-native Virtualization

  • Today - Tech preview (based on KubeVirt), cloud native applications which rely on virtualization components and/or which are transitioning from virtual machines to containers where a single platform is desired

  • Tomorrow - Evolution and improvement of features and capabilities to decrease the function gap between traditional and container-native virtualization

  • Tech preview, as a part of OpenShift 3.11 and versions after, enabling you to test and experiment with container semantics for virtual machines

Enterprise virtualization in a containerized world

Creating virtual machines on Kubernetes with OpenShift’s CNV

Whether you are a new or a seasoned Kubernetes user, or you’re just considering working with Kubernetes, you have probably started exploring the technology and how best to integrate virtual machines with the Kubernetes engine. But which solution fits your needs? Is there a way to leverage both the isolation virtual machines provide and the orchestration platform of the Kubernetes engine? With Red Hat OpenShift, you can do both.

OpenShift 4.3 offers the ability to run both container-based workloads and virtual machines side by side as workloads on a Kubernetes cluster. Installing the Container-native virtualization operator on OpenShift will allow you to create, run, and manage VMs, as well as provide templates to quickly create the same VM multiple times.

For more detail read this blog's content from Red Hat:

RHV VS CNV?

● Each targets different use cases

○RHV = traditional virtualization for “mode 1” applications, providing robust, resilient infrastructure for traditional applications

○CNV = VMs deployed and managed as containers, simplifying the transition of existing applications from conventional virtualization to containers

● Different maturity stages

● Different availability timelines

● It’s all KVM!

Both share the same visionRHV and CNV don’t compete, they complement each other!