oVirt 3.1 has become the second official release of the oVirt project. With it, the developers of the virtual datacentre management platform say they have narrowed the gap between “the open source virtualisation platform and proprietary alternatives”. In February, version 3.0 became the first official release of oVirt, and offered a range of virtualisation management components that also formed the backbone of Red Hat’s own RHEV product (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation). The oVirt project is supported by Canonical, Cisco, IBM, Intel, NetApp, SUSE and Red Hat. Among the enhancements made to the Java-based platform are the addition of support for capturing and cloning live snapshots of virtual machines, hotplug capabilities for virtual disks and network adapters and the ability to connect externally hosted block devices as local disks in a virtual machine.