Professional virtualization with RHV4

Polished

Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) once set off to make professional virtualization at the enterprise level more affordable – in particular for small enterprises. However, the monetary barriers to entry are pretty high if you look at the market leader VMware. RHV4 is available both as a standalone product and as part of Red Hat Cloud Suite, which comprises OpenStack Platform, OpenShift, CloudForms, Satellite, and Ceph storage.

In conjunction with GlusterFS and Ceph storage solutions and integration of OpenShift containers and OpenStack Platform, RHV is a strategic product that can play an important role in transforming IT in many companies. Although still lagging well behind Microsoft, VMware, and Citrix, Red Hat likes to emphasize that its own virtualization solution is finding its way into many businesses via the OpenStack detour.

However, this fact was misunderstood by many companies. Not infrequently, small and medium-sized enterprises switched from VMware to OpenStack for classic virtual server workloads as a cost-effective alternative for vSphere. OpenStack, though, is far too complex as a private cloud solution. According to Red Hat, many such companies are now coming back to RHV after some painful experiences.

In this article, I describe the setup of a small test scenario that investigates whether the elaborate setups required in earlier versions of RHV have become easier, and I take a look at the most important new features, including faster performance, a new programming API, support for OpenStack and containers, the new dashboard for Red Hat Virtualization Manager (RHV-M), and the Cockpit-based option for running the Machine Manager more or less automatically as a hosted engine.

RHV4 Architecture

Setting aside the underlying data of the hypervisor, in which KVM, Xen, vSphere, and Hyper-V traditionally do not differ a great deal, integrated virtualization solutions are

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