Scaling Up On Demand with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization

One of the most compelling features of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 is the ability to hot plug memory. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.5 provided the ability to hot plug vCPU’s to running virtual machines. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 completes this vision of hot plugging resources on demand.

Why do resource hot plugging capabilities matter to an enterprise IT organization? The two

aforementioned features, when paired together, solve real problems. Namely, the ability to truly scale up your virtual machines on demand.

Traditional applications tend to remain firmly rooted in stateful monolithic architectures. These applications typically scale “vertically”, by adding CPU and/or RAM to the virtual machine that hosts the application. This process typically requires a reboot, a manual configuration change, and of course a service disruption. The ability to hot plug virtual CPU’s and virtual memory allows IT organizations to scale up on demand without service interruption.

The ability to hot plug these virtual components is intuitive in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization administration portal, but it’s infinitely repeatable with the REST API. This means that if you’re building an Infrastructure-as-a-Service around Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with something like ServiceNow and/or Red Hat CloudForms, this type of activity can be tracked, automated, and orchestrated - much like a lightweight private cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is focused on automating manual tasks thus simplifying IT operations. The ability to hot plug resources enables organizations to meet service level agreements, streamline management, and easily integrate into the existing infrastructure. Scaling up virtual machines on demand means less disruption and a positive effect on the bottom line.

For more information, please visit the below resources:

• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 Press Release
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Product Page
• Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 60-day Trial Download