Red Hat today introduced a new version of its virtualization platform, Red Hat Virtualization 4.4, that will help customers more easily manage their applications and give its hybrid cloud strategy a boost in the process.

Red Hat Virtualization is an alternative to VMware Inc.’s vSphere. The platform runs on the IBM Corp. subsidiary’s widely used enterprise Linux distribution, RHEL, and provides features for managing large fleets of virtualized applications.

Red Hat Virtualization 4.4 has been updated with support for the latest release of RHEL that Red Hat launched in April. That release, officially RHEL 8.2, introduced performance improvements as well as monitoring features that make it easier to identify security and reliability issues. Red Hat Virtualization customers can now take advantage of those enhancements by upgrading the operating system installations in their deployments.

Also new is an integration with OpenShift, the centerpiece of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio. OpenShift is a Kubernetes-based platform for managing containerizing applications across on-premises and public cloud infrastructure. Thanks to the new integrations, administrators can use OpenShift to centrally manage containers and traditional Red Hat Virtualization-powered applications.

The ability to manage everything in one place should ease administrators’ day-to-day work. The feature also makes Red Hat Virtualization more competitive with vSphere, which provides similar capabilities.

Another component of the platform that has been upgraded today is its monitoring feature set. “We’ve also improved observability with new dashboards for the Data Warehouse (DWH) showing performance and capacity of all your critical inventory,” Peter Lauterbach, a cloud platforms project manager at Red Hat, detailed in a blog post today. “This leads to actionable results with unique analysis and trends of which workloads need attention, and when you need to add more hardware.”

The new Red Hat Virtualization release comes on the heels of an update to Red Hat Ansible, the company’s suite for automating common infrastructure management tasks.

Photo: Red Hat/Flickr