While it is common knowledge in the industry that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation beats Vmware hands down when it comes to pricing, it is more than the 60-80% saving on software cost that should be considered when choosing your virtualisation platform.

It is true that Red Hat’s subscription model renders Enterprise Open Source software such as RHEL, RHEV, Jboss, and OpenShift very affordable but what about technological reasons? Enterprise Open Source is experiencing tremendous uptake globally and it is not only cost that drives this upsurge. Let’s examine some of the key technological motivators in addition to the business case for RHEV.

Business Case

In addition to the cost savings mentioned above, the complete RHEV for Servers enterprise feature set is available through a single, simple subscription and, unlike competitive products, the RHEV for Servers functionality is not segmented into multiple editions and customers are not required to buy add-on products for additional functionality.

The single subscription gives a customer access to support, all upgrades and patches as well as the full set of associated management tools without having to pay any additional fees.

Technological Motivators

Red Hat is positioning its virtualization offering as the “only mission-critical end-to-end, open source virtualization infrastructure designed for enterprise users that is available today.”

Red Hat’s Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor currently holds 19 of the 27 published SPECvirt_sc201 performance benchmarks. That includes the best 2- and 4-socket scores, perhaps the most common host server type, as well as the only published 8-socket scores, showing off enterprise readiness for large organizations.

In terms of scalability, RHEV is unbeaten. With this latest release, RHEV can support up to 160 logical CPU cores up from 64 in the previous release. There is no vCPU limit in RHEV while Vmware maxes out at 2048. It also increases support for up to 2TB of memory per virtual machine.

The KVM hypervisor has been updated to support the latest industry-standard x86 processors such as Intel Core i3, i5, and i7 CPUs, as well as AMD 15h or Opteron G4 CPUs.

Red Hat has really moved the needle on RHEV 3.1 with the addition of two other key features that makes the platform more enterprise-ready;

• The first feature is an updated and hardened ability that allows administrators to make snapshots and clones of running virtual machines. With snapshots, RHEV can save a copy of the running virtual machine for record-keeping purposes. These snapshots can now be created without first having to stop the virtual machine, thus maintaining environment uptime. With cloning, RHEV can now make a copy of a running virtual machine, or it can create a virual machine from a snapshot. This allows users to create copies of the state of a virtual machine at the moment the snapshot was taken. This is particularly valuable in software development environments where frequent testing takes place.
• The second feature, live storage migration, allows  users to dynamically migrate VM storage across different storage arrays without first shutting down the virtual machine(s) in question.

The new release further 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.

DcData has been a leader in the Linux, Open Source and virtualization arenas for many years – please contact our team of experts to learn more about how virtualization can assist your company.

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