Posted on behalf of Gireesha US from Dell Linux Engineering team
Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 is supported on shipping PowerEdge 11th generation and 12th generation servers (2-socket and 4-socket servers). It has been validated and certified on the list of supported Dell PowerEdge Servers to ensure our customers 100% compatibility and stability.
For instance, Dell's 12th Generation server R820 provides an excellent option to customers to stack up a single server with 1.5TB of memory, which is one of the major requirements for hypervisor to run more VMs . Also this will enable RHEV to satisfy customers who want high end Virtual machines to be spawned with large memory configuration. Please refer the knowledge base and important information guide for more information about Dell Hardware Platforms support with RHEV 3.0.
RHEV 3.0 has been released from Red Hat in the month of Jan 2012 . Some of the notable features included in the relesase are :
- Increase virtual machine resource allocations, live migration, and increased operational efficiency.
- The RHEV Manager (RHEV-M), used to manage all hypervisors, storage and VMs, is now a Java application, so it can be run on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) system. In RHEV 2.2, RHEV-M must run on a Windows 2008 Server R2 system.
- The KVM hypervisor is based on the latest RHEL 6 release.
- Local storage on the hypervisors can now be used for VM and templates.
- Added scalability levels, including support for 160 Cores(Up from 96) and 2TB memory for hosts.
- RHEV Manager able to manage up to 200 host servers (Up from 100)
RHEV 3.0 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2 kernel. All the peripherals which has native support in RHEL 6.2, will have native support in RHEV-H (Hypervisor) . New add-on drivers or Red Hat DUP (Driver update Package) will not be supported on RHEV-H (RHEV 3.0). Customers can use RHEL 6.2 as hypervisor for add-on drivers on peripherals without native support.
RHEL 6.2 can also be converted to act as an hypervisor by installing a few additional RHEV packages. Please refer the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization documentation for more information.
To enable Dell OpenManage support on RHEV environment, customer need to install RHEL 6.2 OS and additional hypervisor packages in the same order. Because add-on drivers, packages and DUPs will be not be installed directly on RHEV-H.
With the set of security features packed into 12th Generation server iDRAC (like Built in hidden root key feature, TPM etc.) RHEV/Red Hat customers can be rest assured about the safety and security of their hypervisor hosts from malicious attacks (Refer to link: http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/extras/m/white_papers/20095301/download.aspx)
Few community blogs about RHEV support on Dell PowerEdge Servers:
http://en.community.dell.com/dell-blogs/software/b/software/archive/2012/03/05/redhatannouncesreleaseofrhev3.0.aspx
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter/b/techcenter/archive/2011/10/05/red-hat-enterprise-virtualization-3-0-beta-available.aspx