Red Hat has released the first public beta for RHEV 3 in the last week or so. I didn’t have time to play with it since yesterday, waiting for the rest of Irene to strike my city.
So, I grabbed the documentation, go through it rapidly and start the installation on a spare server I have at home. The first thing to notice is how wonderful it is to just “yum install rhevm”! Seriously, compare that to the need to install Windows 2k8, Active Directory, .Net, etc, etc… This is a major step up for RHEV.
After playing with RHEV for the whole day, here is what I conclude :
– For a first public beta, RHEV 3 is extremely stable. I saw some problems here and there but nothing major. There is some errors in the documentation and some problems accessing the Spice console with Fedora 15 and Gnome 3 (and this one is not necessarily a RHEV problem). Everything is stable, smooth and work as advertised. I am impressed because I thought that porting from .Net to Java would cause more problems than that.
– RHEV 3 also gave me the chance to play with FreeIPA, which is in “Technology Preview” in RHEL 6.1. Again, really impressed with this product and will be sure to look at it again on it’s own in the near future.
– The upgrade to RHEL 6.x really show : the performance are amazing. I look forward to try RHEV 3 on bigger hardware than what I have currently. This is largely due in performance improvement in the kernel and KVM : KVM performance improvements and optimizations
– I like how Red Hat used their technologies combined with other major Open Source products : JBOSS, OpenJDK, PostgreSQL, KVM, RHEL 6.x, FreeIPA, etc. I like that a big project like RHEV based on Windows, .Net, Active Directory and SQL Server can be ported to stable and trusted Open Source equivalent.
The only downside from all this is that you still need Internet Explorer to access the Administration console. After searching for a bit, this is supposedly going to be fixed in RHEV 3.1. This is a small downside for all the gain that RHEV 3 come with.
Jeff's Blog 
What’s the background on RHEV on why it was .NET, etc ? Was it a third party acquisition that is now an in house product?
The technologies behind RHEV was acquired when Red Hat bought Qumranet in 2008. This is why it has in .Net at first.
Hello there,
I’m still new to Red Hat products, and would like to try RHEV.
How can I try RHEV?? how do I install it??
I am running OpenSuSE now, do I need to install Fedora 15/16
and then yum install rhevm ??
TIA
I think that you cannot try RHEV without buying it.
Red Hat has some plans to Open Source the components of RHEV when the transition to Linux is over.
A gentle correction…
Red Hat is just now talking to select partners about how they can make a free download of RHEV available for their customers. Please stay tuned, Jeff’s BLOG. I think he will have more to write on this subject as early as Monday!
Kevin Pereau
The RHEV Guy
Red Hat
Thanks for the reply/clarification.
Cheers.
Yes, you can download ‘RHEV’ for free. Red Hat is opening the source code in the ovirt.org project, which will adopt the release cycle similar to how Fedora => RHEL works.
The first meeting on the project is being held next week.
http://www.ovirt.org/
Cheers,
-Vince
why, why why IE ??!!
Internet Explorer was a legacy requirement of the original WPF code that RHEV was ported from. There’s just a lot of code to move over. You don’t HAVE to wait for RHEV 3.1, though. Although IE is still required for some tasks, there is a Tech Preview of the new HTML5-based Web Admin. You can install it by:
yum install rhevm-webadmin-portal
service jbossas restart
The address to use the Tech Preview Web Admin is then https://server:8443/webadmin
Keep in mind that this is a Tech Preview, not supported, unfinished code, but in a pinch, you can get Firefox working to do a good deal of your day-to-day management tasks.