Red Hat releases KVM hypervisor 3.0

El Reg reports that Red Hat has released version 3.0 of its enterprise virtualization server, RHEV.

It appears that the biggest change is that you can now manage it from Linux and don't need Windows.  Wait. What?  I guess it had something to do with the QEMU technology that it got when it bought Qumranet in sept 2008 (huh?). Oh well - read the article yourself.

Code has been ported from .NET to Java, database has been ported to Postgres,  you can still use Active directory to manage user logins, plus their own LDAP/Kerberos.

More scalable - up to 128 physical cores and 2TB main memory, guests can have 64 virtual cores and 2TB virtual memory.

Cost?

"Companies decide to standardize their Linuxes on RHEL, then they virtualize their workloads using either the integrated KVM or RHEV. Then, they look at the cost of vSphere from VMware and decide to try a few Windows workloads on RHEV. Thadani says that prior to VMware's vSphere 5.0 launch and its memory tax, RHEV cost about one-seventh as much per host to virtualize x64 machines with the same number of VMs. But in the wake of the virtual memory tax, even after VMware's rejiggering, RHEV now costs one-fifteenth to one-twentieth of vSphere 5.0 to virtualize a big, fat server."

This is pretty cool, and there are definitely places in labs where this technology should be tested.

[p]