Red Hat Advances Enterprise Virtualization Platform with New Release

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 Globally Available with New Features Spanning Scalability, Networking and Storage, Including Integration with Red Hat Storage

KUALA LUMPUR – December 7, 2012 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced advancements for its enterprise virtualization platform with the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1. The 3.1 release brings Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization forward with compelling new features to enhance its scalability, user administration and management interface, networking, storage and virtual desktop functionality. With this release, Red Hat also brings further flexibility for the combination of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and the full Red Hat portfolio, including its Red Hat Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Linux platforms.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is the only mission-critical end-to-end, open source virtualization infrastructure designed for enterprise users that is available today. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 release, which debuted in January 2012, marked a significant industry milestone, offering features, performance, scalability and cost advantages to enterprises. Today, with the introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor holds 19 of the 27 published SPECvirt_sc2010 (www.spec.org) performance benchmarks, including the best 2-socket and 4-socket scores and the only published 8-socket scores. At 50 to 70 percent lower cost compared to alternative solutions, it can also offer organizations significant economic advantages.

Key 3.1 Feature Additions
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 incorporates several new key features. For its main platform, 3.1 enables increased scalability of guest virtual machines, now providing support for up to 160 logical CPUs and up to 2 terabytes of memory, per virtual machine, and updates its KVM hypervisor to support the latest industry-standard x86 processors. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization shares the same base KVM hypervisor technology as Red Hat Enterprise Linux and maintains common ABI compatibility, enabling optimized flexibility for combining the two platforms from a single vendor.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 also includes an updated user interface, improved cross-platform web administration portal, updated reporting dashboard, new networking capabilities and enhanced disk storage. The incorporation of a technology preview of storage live migration adds the flexibility to migrate virtual machine disk files between storage domains without having to power down the virtual machine. The power user portal has been enhanced with resource quota functionality to enable self-service for test/development and other private cloud use cases. The release also features new advancements for the platform’s VDI capabilities, including a new virtual desktop autostart policy, improved WAN optimizations and an improved virtual desktop client.

With 3.1, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization also expands its localization enablement with support for English, French, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Japanese, enabling the platform to be used even more widely around the globe.

Red Hat Storage Integration
A key addition to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 is integration with Red Hat Storage, Red Hat’s scale-out, open source storage software solution for the management of data. Based on the GlusterFS technology Red Hat received from its Oct. 2011 acquisition of Gluster, Inc., Red Hat Storage Server 2.0 became available worldwide in June 2012, providing enterprise customers with open, unified scale-out storage software.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 provided the ability to access virtual images/storage over iSCSI, Fibre-Channel NFS or on local storage. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, the platform’s versatility is now broadened, enabling it to access the secure, shared storage pool managed by Red Hat Storage. In addition to providing the essential building blocks for open hybrid clouds, this integration also offers enterprises reduced operational costs, expanded portability, choice of infrastructure, flexibility, scalability, availability and the power of community-driven innovation with the contributions of the open source oVirt and Gluster projects. The combination of these platforms is the first step toward Red Hat’s vision of an integrated and converged Red Hat Storage and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization node that serves both compute and storage resources.

Availability
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 is globally available to subscribing Red Hat customers today. A fully supported, 60-day trial of the release is also available at
www.redhat.com/promo/rhev3.



Red Hat Delivers New Choice in Open Virtualization in Collaboration with Key Partner
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Now with HP VirtualSystem VS2 Speeds Virtualization to Increase Performance

KUALA LUMPUR – December 7, 2012 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced – in line with the global availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 – that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is supported by HP VirtualSystem VS2. HP VirtualSystem VS2 is a new converged system reference architecture designed to speed virtualization software deployment while maximizing performance and scale as organizations move to cloud computing.

HP has offered Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization subscriptions and support services on HP ProLiant servers since the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 in January 2012. Consulting, education and implementation services for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization are also available through HP.

The HP VirtualSystem VS2 Reference Architecture for Red Hat is an enterprise-business, single-rack solution that is optimized for compute density. It is based on the HP BladeSystem C7000 Enclosure, HP ProLiant BL460c servers, HP 5800 Switch Series and HP LeftHand P4800 Storage for BladeSystem and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. The combined solution is designed to support hundreds of virtual machines, and provides a base set of extended configurations and sizing for typical workloads for deployment optimization.

Availability
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, including the new 3.1 update, is available worldwide today from HP.

Red Hat Expands Virtualization Collaboration with SAP via New Certification

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 Certified for SAP® Solution-based Production Environments; Maintaining Leading Benchmark Results and Meeting Customer Needs 

KUALA LUMPUR – December 7, 2012 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the certification of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 for SAP® business applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This is a continuation of the companies’ joint work on virtualization and an expansion of SAP’s certification of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 platform release. The certification marks the latest milestone in a 15-year alliance formed to help simplify deployments of SAP applications on physical Red Hat servers, in virtualized environments or in the cloud, bringing new choice to enterprises worldwide.

Enterprise customers such as TCC Technology Co. Ltd., Thailand’s leading provider of commercial managed hosting and datacenter services, are turning to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization to achieve business continuity, agility and cost efficiency for their deployments of SAP applications.

“Although virtualization is an established global trend, we had not used it to support mission-critical applications until we found Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and applied it to our hosted services for SAP solutions,” said Kosit Suksingha, managing director of TCC Technology. “It has proven to be reliable, cost-effective and scalable, helping us to offer commercially attractive hosted services for SAP solutions on a pay-as-you-go basis.”

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is the only mission-critical end-to-end, open source virtualization infrastructure designed for enterprises that is available today. Providing an open virtualization hypervisor with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and robust management tools based on the open source oVirt project, the portfolio delivers leading performance, scalability, flexibility and cost benefits. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1, available globally today, delivers new features and integrations spanning scalability, networking, storage and more.

In addition to achieving leading performance results on the two-tier SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) standard application benchmark announced in June1 – with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and its KVM hypervisor running the SAP ERP 6.0 application – Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has, as of Dec. 1, 2012, attained the seven highest SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmarks (www.spec.org). 

Availability

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.1 is available globally for production use with SAP solutions today.

Red Hat Continues Leadership and Momentum with Open Hybrid Clouds

Company Expands Cloud Offerings with Delivery of Red Hat CloudForms 1.1 and Two Cloud Solution Bundles with Corresponding Services Offering

KUALA LUMPUR – December 7, 2012 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced advancements in its delivery of open hybrid cloud solutions and technologies to enterprises. Expanding its cloud footprint, Red Hat today delivers an update to its open hybrid cloud management platform with the availability of Red Hat CloudForms 1.1 and releases two cloud solution bundles and a services offering combining several of Red Hat’s leading product portfolios.

Red Hat CloudForms 1.1

In early June 2012, Red Hat delivered the first release of Red Hat CloudForms, an open hybrid cloud management platform built to enable enterprises to create and manage Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hybrid clouds with the ability to make self-service computing resources available to users in a managed, governed and secure way. With CloudForms, enterprises can build and manage an open enterprise hybrid cloud, providing infrastructure choice spanning across multiple virtualization platforms and extending to public cloud resources, and can build and manage applications in their cloud, enabling enterprises to use their cloud for their workloads.

Today, Red Hat updates the CloudForms platform with the release of CloudForms 1.1. With this release, Red Hat has expanded the reach of the product further into Asia Pacific and Europe with enablement for four additional languages, including Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and Portuguese. The 1.1 release also incorporates a number of updates and fixes covering features such as:

• System Groups: allowing administrators to easily organize systems to perform actions, such as updating packages, upon many systems as if they were one.

• LDAP Support: allowing enterprises to leverage their existing identity management solutions within CloudForms.

• Content searching: providing enterprises the ability to quickly search all application lifecycle environments for specific pieces of content. 

Open Hybrid Cloud Solutions and Open IaaS Architecture Service Offering

At the Red Hat Summit in June 2012, Red Hat announced a set of solutions designed to enable enterprises to build and manage open hybrid clouds. Combining Red Hat’s full portfolio of products, the solutions offer enterprises an easy on-ramp to open hybrid cloud computing with reduced complexity. 

The first of the four solutions, Red Hat Storage, was delivered in June 2012. Today, Red Hat announces the general availability of two additional open hybrid cloud solutions:

 Red Hat Hybrid IaaS Solution: This offering reduces the complexity of building a hybrid cloud by providing a comprehensive set of software components to save time in deploying a hybrid cloud. The solution includes virtualization management with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization; a hybrid cloud management framework with Red Hat CloudForms; guest operating system with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the ability to add on-demand public cloud compute hours with Red Hat Certified Public Cloud Providers.

 Red Hat Cloud with Virtualization Bundle: With this offering, customers can combine cloud and virtualization projects into one step to enable the acceleration of project completion, the reduction of project hours and lowered total cost of ownership. This solution includes software needed to build and manage a cloud, from virtualization management to cloud orchestration, to cover virtual machine management, systems management and application lifecycle management. Included in the solution bundle are Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and Red Hat CloudForms.

In addition, Red Hat is also launching a new cloud-focused offering from its Services team, called the Open IaaS Architecture Service. Cloud services from Red Hat are designed to accelerate the development of functional, enterprise-ready clouds and their associated services and benefits to enterprises. To help enable a customer’s private or hybrid cloud for success from day one, Red Hat offers its Open IaaS Architecture Service, which defines, designs, installs and optimizes Red Hat’s cloud and virtualization offerings to deliver an open, scalable IaaS specific to each customer’s environment. The service also includes documentation of the installation as well as guidance on best practices for ongoing management.

Availability

CloudForms 1.1 is available today with support from Red Hat. The Red Hat Hybrid IaaS Solution, the Red Hat Cloud with Virtualization Bundle and the Open IaaS Architecture Service are initially offered in North America, the United Kingdom and Continental Europe, with plans for global availability in the future.