[Red Hat vs VMware vs Microsoft …] Red Hat has done a remarkable job evolving its Virtualization platform over the recent years. While (some) vendors started to sacrifice features or shifted focus onto wider cloud management aspects, Red Hat rightly emphazises that Virtualization continues to be a critical core technology of today’s datacenters.
The 4.1 release recently made available, continues to stand out with over 150 new features and enhancements.
While historically challenged by Citrix XenServer and Oracle OVM, Red Hat claims 3rd spot with the current release of its KVM based virtualization platform! Congrats!
There are a range of enhancements to the core platform as well as increased focus on integrating with management and automation platforms.
Core platform improvements include:
- support for QCOW2 v3 image format (improving storage efficiency and performance)
- “hot-remove” CPUs (limited to CPUs previously “hot-plugged”)
- Ability to live migrate VMs configured with SR-IOV
- Ability to ability to sparsify a thin-provisioned disk has been added to RHV (convert the free space within the disk image back to free space on the host)
- Enhanced high availability without power management allowing virtual machines to be restarted even when power management fencing is not available
- Support for up to 288 vCPU per vm
New – Compare RHV 4.1
While continuing to improve the core capabilities of the platform, Red Hat has clearly grasped the importance of integrating it with the wider cloud management and automation frameworks.
- There are updates to the integration with CloudForms (Red Hat’s hybrid management platform for multi-vendor virtualization technologies, private clouds and public clouds) allowing virtual machines to scale up then back down again on demand, manage live snapshots for backup/recovery, and balance workloads across clusters, all automated through CloudForms.
- RHV 4.1 continues to share the Glance image service with RHOSP (Red Hat OpenStack Platform) allowing both to use the same core images, streamlining operations and saving storage. The Neutron service provides software defined networking to RHV. The updates to RHV 4.1 include the ability for RHOSP director to deploy a standalone Neutron server to the Red Hat Virtualization Manager host, providing tighter network integration.
- There is also improved automation with Ansible (automation engine designed to simplify multi-tier deployments) enabling end users to automate Red Hat Virtualization platforms using a range of Ansible 4.1 modules to automate the configuration of compute, network, and storage resources within the RHV environment.
There is more to look forward to – just check out the Tech Preview for the Open Virtual Network (OVN) for Open vSwitch. OVN exposes an OpenStack Networking (Neutron)-compatible API to use with existing Neutron automation. It allows you to add OVN as an external network provider, and import or create networks from it in the Red Hat Virtualization Manager. You can then provision virtual machines with network interfaces connected using these logical overlays (OVN networks).
Don’t forget to check out our Cloud Management Platform comparison and feel free to submit community feedback by clicking on any of the table fields …
Many thanks to Category Consultant Roman Macek from The Virtualists and the Red Hat team for providing input and feedback!
Enjoy the updated comparison!
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