We are pleased to announce the Beta 3 release of Red Hat Virtualization 4.2, the latest version of our Red Hat Virtualization platform. This follows the release of the Beta 2 on February 16 of this year, as we push closer to the public release of Red Hat Virtualization 4.2 in May.

While many of the new features were highlighted in the previous announcements in January and February, it is worth noting the addition of some additional new features to this beta release.

In my last post, I walked you through my quest of understanding IT optimization and why there is a need to pursue it. I also hinted at how Red Hat products and solutions can help you both optimize and innovate. Before we dive into the specifics of optimization, let’s start where we left off last time–infrastructure. Now, there are a lot of different ways to slice and dice your It infrastructure, but, it’s elementary, my dear Watson (I guess that makes me the ITO Sherlock)! The first slice is the platform, which is the foundation of your entire infrastructure. The second is the storage, which hosts all your data and applications. The final slice is the deployment footprint of choice, which determines how your infrastructure is utilized and managed. In this post, I will talk about the foundational piece, which is the platform, and how Red Hat Enterprise Linux can help you modernize your platform.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it’s now possible to configure and deploy a capacity-optimized NFS server – shared storage that costs less and stores more.  Using the new Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) module introduced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5,  you can provide shared optimized storage for backups, virtual desktops, virtual servers, and for containers.

This post demonstrates how to create an advanced Network Attached Storage server that provides advanced capacity optimization services by combining VDO with many of the existing Red Hat features such as thin provisioning and snapshot capabilities.   Combined with the high performance NFS server implementation provided by Red Hat, you get a powerful solution that can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. For this example I’m using an industry-standard server with 10Gb Ethernet connectivity and SSD storage.  In later articles I’ll use the NFS server to store various types of data and look at the results in terms of efficiency and performance.

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, we’ve introduced virtual data optimizer (VDO). VDO allows you to save disk space and reduce replication bandwidth with the help of data compression and data deduplication.

In this blog post I want to walk you through how you can use the cockpit Web admin console that comes with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to set up VDO and save substantial amount of space for your virtual machine images.

New to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.5, Virtual Data Optimizer (VDO) is a device mapper module which adds data reduction capabilities to the Linux block storage stack. VDO uses inline compression and data deduplication techniques to transparently shrink data as it is being written to storage media.

VDO combines three techniques — zero-block elimination, data deduplication, and data compression — to reduce data footprint.  The first of these, zero-block elimination, works by eliminating blocks of data consisting entirely of zeros while the second technique, data deduplication, eliminates identical copies of blocks of data that have already been stored. Finally, data compression is applied, which reduces the size of the unique blocks of data stored. By utilizing these techniques, VDO can dramatically increase