Storage Live Migration is one of the major improvements that Red Hat has introduced with the first beta of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.1, which is now available for testing. The feature allows administrators to migrate virtual machine (VM) disk images between storage arrays without having to shut them down first.

The RHEV 3.1 beta also does away with the old management web front end that required Internet Explorer. The old front end has been replaced with a new web administration portal that was introduced in 3.0 but was still classified as a technology preview at the time; the new portal can also be used with version 10 of Firefox or later. The beta offers improved P2V (Physical to Virtual) tools, used to migrate operating systems that are installed on physical hardware to virtual machines. The virtualisation product uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3 components and therefore inherits the improvements in this version, including those that affect scalability.

The documentation for the beta provides more details about these and other new features. The new RHEV version is based on the recently released OVirt 3.1 code. RHEV subscribers can download the first beta for version 3.1 of RHEV from Red Hat.

(crve)