The new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers platform made its debut yesterday, with Red Hat touting it as a “standalone, lightweight, high-performance hypervisor” that “provides a solid virtualization foundation for cloud deployments” and comes with software “for configuring, provisioning, managing and organizing virtualized Linux and Microsoft Windows servers.”

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) is Red Hat Inc.’s server virtualization platform.

RHEV Manager, also called the RHEV-M management console, provides a Web Interface for managing virtual machines (VMs) running on physical nodes. The nodes themselves can be configured with the RHEV-H hypervisor or as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers with a virtualization entitlement. In an effort by Red Hat to be 100% open source, RHEV management is browser-based and can be accessed from any platform. RHEV does not mandate any specific storage requirements, but it contains a central storage repository. The underlying kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) hypervisor is integrated into the Linux kernel, which allows for cost savings as well as security and performance improvements over other platforms.