Red Hat, Inc., the North Carolina-based multinational software company that's best known for its enterprise operating system Linux, has released a new version of its virtualization product, Red Hat Virtualization (RHV).

Enter Red Hat Virtualization 4.0

Launched August 24, RHV 4.0 offers several improvements, enhancements and new features over previous versions of the Red Hat's popular virtualization product. Among the most notable changes is dropping the word “enterprise.” All previous versions of Red Hat's virtualization product have been referred to as Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV). But the latest version is simply called Red Hat Virtualization, or RHV.

So, why did Red Hat decide to drop the word “enterprise” from its virtualization product? Sources claim this move was done to better align RHV with the platform for convergence instead of a server density product. As explained by Scott Herold, Rat Hat has reevaluated its place in the virtualization market to offer the best quality product for its customers and ultimately the most success for Red Hat.

"One of the things we had been chasing in the past at Red Hat is looking at the things that VMware had been doing, and we realized that wasn't the right approach," said Scott Herold, principal product manager for Red Hat Virtualization, during an interview with eWEEK. "So what we've done from top to bottom is we've looked at our virtualization products to determine what the right position is for Red Hat in the market to have the most success."

According to an article published by eWeek, the release of RHV 4.0 is part of Red Hat's rebranding process. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) had been on the market since 2009. And while it wasn't a failure by any means, the company is looking to increase its visibility and capture a greater share of the ever-growing virtualization market with its new RHV 4.0.

In the past, Red Hat has tried to convince users to ditch their existing VMware products in favor of RHEV. This didn't work, however, due to the fact that many users had already signed multi-year license agreements with their respective virtualization products. So, Red Hat needed a different approach to convince users to buy its virtualization product. This prompted the company to cuts costs for extras like support and maintenance, which ultimately made its virtualization product cheaper than many of its competitors.

To put the cost-savings benefits of RHV 4.0 into perspective, Scott Herold says customers can expect to save roughly 60% when switching from traditional VMware products to RHV 4.0 over the course of four years – all without sacrificing any features or performance.

New Features

Of course, RHV 4.0 introduces many other new features than just a name change. For starters the new and improved version of Red Hat's virtualization product is powered by a new operating system. RHEV 3.0 ran the company's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 OS, while RHV 4.0 runs Red Hat Enterprise 7. This provides system administrators with greater management powers over their containers when compared to prior versions of Red Hat virtualization.

RHV 4.0 also introduces two features from other Red Hat projects: Red Hat CloudForms and Red Hat Satellite. With Red Hat CloudForms, users can manager their RHV 4.0 as one of many cloud resources (public and private clouds) through a convenient interface.

There's also a new API introduced in RHV 4.0 that allows third parties to implement their own network management systems into the product. If you've used Red Hat OpenStack in the past, you can leverage OpenStack's Neutron networking component.

These are just a few of the new features that you can expect to see in RHV 4.0. The bottom line is that Red Hat's latest virtualization update aims at convincing VMware customers that it's cheaper for them to make the switch in the long run. Perhaps users won't save money initially, or even after a year, but over the course of four years users can expect to save an average of 60% when compared to VMware. When speaking about large tech companies, that's a serious cash-savings.

Virtualization Technology: the Basics

In case this is your first time hearing about virtualization technology, you might be wondering what it is exactly and how it works. While we could write an entirely different blog post on this subject (and we may later, so stay tuned), here's the basics of virtualization technology.

Virtualization, when speaking in the context of servers, refers to technology used to partition a physical server and its respective hardware into two or more smaller, virtual servers. This is done using virtualization software, such as RHV 4.0.

There are several benefits associated with using virtualization software. For starters, it allows for more efficient use of server resources. It's able to achieve this by partitioning the physical server into several smaller virtual servers, each of which looks and functions like a separate server. Instead of running a single instance of an OS on a single server, for instance, a company or organization can run several instances of an OS on a single server. Each of these instances is essentially a virtual server, meaning it functions just like a standalone server.

And thanks to the increased efficiency of server resource usage, companies and organizations can benefit from reduces IT costs as well. Virtualization is a highly effective way to lower traditional IT operating costs, especially for large companies. These savings come in the form of reduces hardware expenditure, reduced operating expenditure, and even energy-efficiency savings.

You can learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization by visiting the company's official website at https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/virtualization.

Thanks for reading and feel free to let us know your thoughts in the comments below regarding Virtualization.