oVirt 3.1 "narrows gap" with proprietary virtualisation

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. Support for managing floating virtual disks and configuring Gluster storage has also been added to the web administration console. oVirt 3.1 recognises more identity providers with support for Red Hat Directory Server and IBM's Tivoli Directory Server added to its existing support for pairing identity service based users and quota capabilities.

One of the enhancements mentioned in the release notes includes a new "all-in-one" installation mode which allows a single machine to run as the management engine and act as a virtualisation host. This is ideal for the "proof-of-concept" phase of a project. Other changes include the addition of an identifier to allow events to be tracked throughout the system during debugging, support for mounting any POSIX compliant filesystem, the ability to re-import a virtual machine and the addition of a new Python SDK and CLI. Developers will find that JSON and session support have both been added to oVirt's rest API.

A direct upgrade from oVirt 3.0 to 3.1 is not recommended and users should follow a migration path noted in the release notes, exporting all virtual machines, removing oVirt 3.0, upgrading to Fedora 17, installing oVirt 3.1 and reimporting all virtual machines.

oVirt 3.1 is available to download as binaries or as source code from the get oVirt page on the project's web site. The oVirt project uses the Apache 2.0 License as its primary licence.

(djwm)