This feature provides KVM support for stable technology that is already used in data center with bare metal systems. SNMP is the standard for monitoring and is extremely well understood as well as computationally efficient. System monitoring via SNMP in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 allows the KVM hosts to send SNMP traps on events so that hypervisor events can be communicated to the user via standard SNMP protocol. This feature is provided through the addition of a new package: libvirt-snmp. This feature is introduced as a Technology Preview.

Virtualization and cloud products that run networking work loads need to run wire speeds. Up until Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, the only way to reach wire speed on a 10 GB Ethernet NIC with a lower CPU utilization was to use PCI device assignment (passthrough), which limits other features like memory overcommit and guest migration

The macvtap/vhost zero-copy capabilities allows the user to use those features when high performance is required. This feature improves performance for any Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.x guest in the VEPA use case. This feature is introduced as a Technology Preview.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 introduces the Live Snapshot feature as a Technology Preview. The live snapshots feature provides automatic backup of virtual machine images on the hard drive, and provides a per drive snapshot of the virtual disks transparently, using external qcow2 images. Multi-disk live snapshot creation helps with maintaining data integrity by pausing qemu prior to taking as many snapshots as there are disks. Thus, a multi-disk snapshot will have all disks containing data from the same point in time.

It is important to know that there is a limitation with file system consistency. However, the re-use of the snapshot image is crash-consistent. A user would have to run a file system check (fsck) or replay journal entries, which is similar to booting after pulling the power cord.