Chapter 3. Release Notes

With this update, support for CPU quality of service has been added.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 supports virtio-blk data plane, a QEMU feature that increases performance in heavy I/O scenarios. This allows virtual machines to be configured with additional QEMU threads on the host to offload disk I/O processing from the main emulation thread. The recommended number of threads varies, but is a trade-off between additional threads overhead (increasing the load on the hypervisor in general) and offloading benefits on per-disk basis (heavy I/O virtual machines would benefit most). Note, virtio-blk data plane must be configured per virtual machine for all disks.

This feature is not supported for the virtio-scsi interface.

The self-hosted engine setup work flow has been improved. By using the RHEV-M Virtual Appliance instead of the traditional operating system installation for the Manager virtual machine, the setup time now takes less than 10 minutes (excluding the RPM download time).

The Hosts Heatmap Report was added to this release of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. This report shows a heat map of the average utilization of CPU and memory on selected hosts over a specified time period, providing a visual view of CPU and memory status over time.

When updating the Manager, any package that cannot be rolled back to a previous version is now listed in detail so the user can better evaluate whether to proceed.

HPE Superdome X servers support using the HPE BladeSystem power management agent. To enable power management on a Superdome X or a HPE C7000 blade, in the Administration Portal, use the add hosts or edit hosts dialog, and select 'hpblade' as the fence agent type. In the SSH Port field enter the blade bay number for a C7000 blade or, for Superdome X, the partition number you want to control. To use SSH, add secure=1 in the Options field. This is not required for telnet. Also add the command prompt to the Options field; for use with SSH the Options field would contain "secure=1,cmd_prompt=[prompt]".

This update adds support for integration with Red Hat Satellite 6.1.x, providing the ability to receive information on errata for hosts, virtual machines, and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager in a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment.

Previously, it was only possible to import NFS export domains. Now, it is possible to import Gluster and PosixFS export domains, as well as, NFS export domains.

With this release, Self-Hosted Engine setup can be fully automated by using the RHEV-M Virtual Appliance and dynamically configuring it with cloud-init.

VDSM in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 no longer supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. In this bug, el6 support was removed from the vdsm.spec file to reduce the maintenance required.

Virtual machines can now be imported from VMware using the Administration Portal graphical user interface. VMware providers can be added in the 'External Providers' dialog, and virtual machines imported using the 'Import' dialog.

It is now possible to refresh LUN sizes in existing storage domains so that resized LUNs are properly represented in the Manager.

With this release, virtual machines can be pinned to more than one host. A virtual machine that is pinned to multiple hosts cannot be live migrated, but can be made highly available between the specified hosts. The virtual machine cannot run on any other hosts in the cluster, even if all of the specified hosts are unavailable.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager now provides support for Sun Proxy server with the RFC-2307 schema extension.

This feature reports RX/TX byte statistics for host NICs and virtual machine NICS. In the Administration Portal, the Network Interfaces tab of hosts and virtual machines shows statistics for Rx Rate, Tx Rate, Total Rx, Total Tx, and Drops. The REST API (api/hosts/<host id>/nics/<nic id>/statistics) returns statistics for data.current.rx, data.current.tx, data.total.rx, data.total.tx, errors.total.rx, and errors.total.tx. The drops/errors statistics allow you to check the NIC's health and avoid errors associated with NICs experiencing network issues.

Previously, to make an update to the Manager virtual machine configuration, you needed to update the configuration files on all self-hosted engine hosts. With this enhancement, the information is stored on the shared storage domain and the configuration only needs to be updated once.

With this update, users can now deploy self-hosted engine environments using fibre channel storage domains.

Previously, there was no way to disable the file transfer feature supported by the SPICE console. In this release, the feature can be disabled on a per virtual machine basis from the Administration Portal.

Previously, when a user was connected to a SPICE console via a SPICE proxy, the console connection would drop during virtual machine migration. This happened because the client machine was not able to connect to the display on the destination host machine. Now, for both SPICE and VNC, console access is not interrupted.

Note the following limitations:

1. On virtual machines where both displays (SPICE and VNC) are configured, the console connection persists only when using SPICE, and will otherwise fail.


2. Uninterrupted console access only works with remote-viewer and plugins. It does not work with integrated web-based clients (noVNC and SPICE HTML5) or with third-party VNC viewers.

Previously, when adding a permission via the REST API the user had to specify the role identifier and not the role name. This meant that the user needed to look up the identifier, issuing an additional call to the top level 'roles' collection. Roles have human readable names, such as UserVmManager, but the REST API did not support specifying these names. Now, the REST API supports both ways to specify a role. This is also supported by the Python SDK, the Java SDK, and the RHEVM Shell.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization supports virtual machines with up to 240 vCPUs. The previous version supported a maximum of 160 vCPUs.

Previously, after a query was entered into the search query box the query would disappear when a user switched tabs then returned to the original tab, as there was no infrastructure to store the query. Now, the query in the search query box will be retained after switching tabs.

When a self-hosted engine is unable to connect to the high availability daemon it now prints an error message instead of a stack trace.

With this update the NTP service can now be configured to not start automatically after a manual or autoinstall as the ntpd package provides ntp.conf with pre-configured servers which are invalid for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor deployments without internet access. This update allows users to use ntp=off in grub or autoinstall to disable the NTP daemon. To re-enable the NTP daemon users must use the the text user interface (TUI) to set a non-default NTP server, such as an internal NTP server.

When performing migrations, numbered left and right arrows now indicate incoming and outgoing migrations in the 'Hosts' tab.

This release adds a progress bar to the image uploader tool.

With this release, virtual machine permissions have been adjusted to be more specific. Previously, VM_BASIC_OPERATIONS allowed a user to run, stop, shut down, pause, and hibernate the virtual machine. Now, REBOOT_VM, STOP_VM, SHUT_DOWN_VM, PAUSE_VM, HIBERNATE_VM, and RUN_VM can each be separately assigned.

Normally, the latest client tools are attached to a Windows virtual machine when it is started. However, if a virtual machine is running for a long period of time, updates will not be applied automatically. A notification has been added to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager to indicate the availability of new client tools for Windows virtual machines. If there are new client tools available, an exclamation mark will show beside the virtual machine status icon. The updates take effect at virtual machine reboot.

Previously, if a virtual machine had a virtio-scsi passthrough disk on a direct LUN, VDSM/QEMU had no way of knowing if the LUN had a reservation request against it. The virtual machine then was not prevented from being migrated, thus losing access to the disk. Now, you can mark a direct LUN as having SCSI reservation, which prevents migration of that virtual machine.

With this release, you can now import block storage domains using the REST API.

With this release, the Virtual Machines main tab has been improved to show more detailed data about CPU, memory, and network usage. Instead of a simple bar it now shows historical data and trends.

The provider for the 'internal' user domain has been replaced with the AAA-JDBC extension, which is now installed by default. Upgrading a Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization environment will convert the legacy provider and preserve the 'admin@internal' password. For new installations, the 'admin@internal' password is still set during engine-setup.

Previously, if a virtual machine was pinned to a host, you could not select the Highly Available check box for that virtual machine as high availability would not be able to operate properly. With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6, multiple host pinning is supported and the rule has been updated to allow the Highly Available check box to be selected for virtual machines that are not pinned, pinned to any host (migration disabled, but can be started on any host), or pinned to multiple hosts. Note that in the last scenario, if all pinned hosts are down, the virtual machine won't have a host to start on.

This release adds the ability to edit the connection details of ISO and Export storage domains.

With this update websocket proxy configuration values are now validated to prevent misconfiguration.

Kernel SamePage Merging (KSM) can now be configured to obey or ignore Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) topology constraints in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager. KSM can now either merge pages across the whole machine, ignoring NUMA topology, or merge pages only inside NUMA nodes while obeying the NUMA boundaries.

Previously, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager only allowed a maximum of 4000GB of memory per virtual machine. Now, the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager can configure up to 4TB of memory per virtual machine.

With this update, the existing notifier filter mechanism has been extended to provide support for severities in an extra, optional field:

  PATTERN=include|exclude:event[:severity][(subscriber)]
                    
The parser accepts the previous format for backward compatibility.

An 'include' filter matches events with greater-or-equal severity. An 'exclude' filter matches events with lesser-or-equal severity.

With this update, users can now edit the name of virtual disks attached to a virtual machine in the New VM window when creating a virtual machine based on a template. This allows users to specify names that are different to those specified for the disks attached to the template.

With this update, glusterVolumeProfileInfo is now supported as part of the Gluster profile support.

With this release, the menu File->USB device selection is disabled on Windows client machines if usbclerk is not running and usbdk is not installed. For Spice usbredir to work, it is required that either usbclerk is running or usbdk is installed (or both). When it is known that usbredir will fail, it is better and clearer to the user to disable it.

Previously, using multipath IO, each device was represented as physical devices (/dev/sdx) mapped together. Now, instead of showing each physical device, the LUN list provided during deployment shows the GUID of the multipath device.

The communication between the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager and hosts has been improved. An event-based mechanism now communicates changes in virtual machine statuses instead of polling. This significantly reduces latency and network bandwidth. The improvement is especially noticeable in large-scale environments where hosts or data centers are remote, or connected over a slow connection.

A new domain 'Statistics Hourly Domain' for ad hoc reports has been added in addition to the 'Statistics Daily Domain'. With this update, users can now create more detailed ad hoc reports based on hourly statistics data.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization supports virtual machines with up to 240 vCPUs. The previous version supported a maximum of 160 vCPUs.

Users can now specify custom locations for database backups using an answer file generated by engine-setup that includes the following default key/value.

engine:
                    
OVESETUP_CONFIG/engineDbBackupDir=str:/var/lib/ovirt-engine/backups
                    
dwh:
                    
OVESETUP_DWH_CONFIG/dwhDbBackupDir=str:/var/lib/ovirt-engine-dwh/backups
                    
reports:
                    
OVESETUP_REPORTS_CONFIG/reportsDbBackupDir=str:/var/lib/ovirt-engine-reports/backups
                
Users can edit these values to specify alternate file paths, which will be used by engine-setup when the '--config-append' option is added.

Previously, every host in a self-hosted engine environment stored a configuration file for the self-hosted engine virtual machine. As a result, any change to the configuration required users to update the file on each host. Now, a single self-hosted engine configuration file is saved on shared storage, and can be accessed by all hosts.

With this release, role-bearing network interfaces must have IP configuration, to ensure that they can function as is expected from their role. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager will no longer allow configuring role-bearing NICs with no means to actualize the role function.

This release adds SR-IOV enablement to the user interface. In order to connect a vNIC directly to a Virtual Function of an SR-IOV-enabled NIC, the vNIC's profile must be marked as a "passthrough" one. The properties that must be configured on the Virtual Function are taken from the vNIC's profile/network (vlan tag). Each SR-IOV-enabled host-NIC must have a defined set of networks that it is allowed to service. When starting the virtual machine, its vNIC will be directly connected to one of the free Virtual Functions on the host. Note that not all Physical Functions are equivalent: the vNIC must be connected via a host-NIC that has the vNIC's network as one of its allowed networks.

With this release, Windows 10 is supported as a guest operating system in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization.

The Affinity Rules Enforcement Manager has been added to check for broken affinity and anti-affinity policies and migrate virtual machines if necessary.

Previously, when manually deploying a hosted engine, deployment would fail if the admin password provided in the hosted-engine setup on the host did not match the admin password provided in the engine-setup on the virtual machine. Now, the user will be prompted again until the passwords match.

This release adds prefix format support. Both netmask and prefix format are now supported in the netmask field of static IP configuration.

Users can now add an answerfile entry to enable automatic shutdown of a virtual machine at the end of the hosted engine deployment process. This allows for full automation of the process.

Running engine-setup now checks the expiration date of relevant certificates (including the internal CA certificate and those signed by it) and asks the user whether to renew any certificate that has expired, or is close to expiring. If the user selects 'Yes', those certificates are renewed; 'No' will not alter anything.

Host Network QoS adds the ability to configure QoS for networks on a host, enabling control of specific network traffic through the physical interfaces.

This feature introduces new REST API resources for a better way to manage networks. Network related tasks like removing unmanaged networks, attaching new networks, and creating bonds are now easier using the new 'HostSetupNetworks' and 'NetworkAttachment' entities.

It is now possible to use the REST API to define specific credentials to each iSCSI target per host by sending a POST request to '/api/hosts/{%host_id%}/storageconnectionextensions'.

With this release, the German translation has been reworked and improved.

A new user role 'VmImporterExporter' is now available. The role allows users to export and import virtual machines in the Administration Portal. The 'DataCenterAdmin' permission is no longer required for performing such actions.

This release introduces the Host Upgrade Manager, which notifies the user of available updates to hosts and automates the process of moving the host to maintenance mode, applying updates, and reactivating the host.

When creating a template, users can now set the format of the template's disk volumes on creation. This enables users to define disks in the thin provisioning QCOW2 format.

This release introduces the Host Upgrade Manager, a set of tools that notifies administrators of available updates to a host, and automates the process of putting the host into maintenance mode, updating its packages, and bringing it back to an Up state.

With this release, it is now possible to customize the system UUID of virtual machines.

With this release, users can override the RHEVM Appliance's default memory value during hosted-engine deployment.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor users can now configure the logrotate interval and maximum size via automated installation options. The parameters can be used together or separately. If used separately, the default value for 'logrotate_max_size' is '1024' and the default value for 'logrotate_interval' is 'daily'.

Hosts can now be marked as Foreman/Satellite hosts in the 'Edit Hosts' window after they have been added to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager. You can choose a Foreman/Satellite provider for the host when you select the 'Use Foreman/Satellite' check box.

Error reporting in the ovirt-optimizer result report has been improved. It now differentiates between errors when there is no solution, no such cluster, and an empty solution.

File-type storage domains now use separate IOProcess instances. This improves performance, and prevents one slow or unreachable storage domain from affecting other storage domains.

Previously, the REST API for virtual machine pools creation was limited. Now, the REST API for virtual machine pools creation has been extended to enable configuration of all virtual machine properties on pool level.

This release adds remote-viewer support for proxy authentication. With this update, SPICE can connect via a proxy that requires authentication (such as user name and password) in order to allow only authenticated users to connect via the proxy. As a result, when remote-viewer is configured to use a proxy requiring user authentication, the SPICE client passes authentication information to the proxy, and users connecting with the proxy are authenticated.

This release adds support for Korean to the Administration Portal and User Portal.

With this release, engine-setup notifies the user of the availability of the Reports and Data Warehouse components. These components are not required by all users, so are not installed by default; instead, the installer advertises their availability so that the user can choose whether or not to install them.

With this update, default options have now been added for the Drac7 fencing agent, allowing it to function without the need for prior manual configuration.

With this release, you can give a reason when moving a host to maintenance mode. In some cases, it can be of benefit to see why hosts are in maintenance. On the cluster level, you can set whether you want to be asked for the maintenance reason. If you set it to true (select the check box), you will see a Reason field when moving a host to maintenance.

With this release, you can deploy the Self-Hosted Engine with a virtual appliance image instead of an operating system ISO image.

Previously, after a power outage or another disruptive event, the hosted-engine.lockspace file refused to accept new connections, and virtual machines failed to start. The --reinitialize-lockspace command line option has been added to the hosted-engine command, which reinitializes the sanlock lockspace file and wipes all locks. This option is available only in clusters in global maintenance mode with all high availability agents shut down. Additionally, the --force option can be used with the --reinitialize-lockspace option to override the safety checks, but should be only used with caution.

Users can now perform maintenance tasks on a RHEV-H self-hosted engine through the text user interface (TUI) without entering the rescue shell.

This release adds support for fencing policy per cluster to the REST API. Clusters retrieved from REST will now have a <fencing_policy> section.

UsbDk has been added to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a preferred alternative to usbclerk. UsbDk is a filter driver that allows Windows guest virtual machines access to the client USB devices through SPICE client (remote-viewer).

With this release, hosted engine setup auto-detects available Appliance images and suggests them for use during installation.

With this release, Gluster storage can be used as a data domain on the Self-Hosted Engine.

The global configuration operation has been added to the engine-config tool with the name VmGracefulShutdownTimeout. This configures the length of time, in seconds, the virtual machine will wait before it shuts down to allow for users to close running applications.

With this update, it is now possible to specify whether encryption is set for fence agent fields in the Power Management tab of the New Host and Edit Host windows. This enhancement addresses cases where certain fence agents require the ability to set whether a field is encrypted.

Previously, it was only possible to copy disks attached to a template to a different storage domain. With this release, you can now also copy virtual machine disks and floating disks to either the same or a different storage domain.

Previously, the Java SDK did not support authentication to a RHEV-M server that was configured with Kerberos. Now, the Java SDK supports authentication using a previously obtained Kerberos ticket. When doing this the SDK will take the credentials from the Kerberos credentials cache and will use them to authenticate with the server.The Kerberos environment must be configured correctly before calling the Java SDK and the credentials cache must be  already populated. To configure the environment two files are required, the Kerberos configuration file and the JAAS configuration file. The JAAS configuration file needs to be created with content similar to:

  com.sun.security.jgss.login {

    com.sun.security.auth.module.Krb5LoginModule required client=true useTicketCache=true doNotPrompt=true;

  };
                    
  com.sun.security.jgss.initiate {

    com.sun.security.auth.module.Krb5LoginModule required client=true useTicketCache=true doNotPrompt=true;
                    
  };
                    
In addition to these files the following system properties have to be added to the JVM:
                    
  -Djava.security.auth.login.config=/etc/jaas.conf
  -Djava.security.krb5.conf=/etc/krb5.conf
  -Djavax.security.auth.useSubjectCredsOnly=false

With this release, the Linux Boot Options section of the Run Once window allows users to select kernel and initrd files for Linux virtual machines. Available files are files from the ISO domain of type Unknown (i.e. not ISO, floppy, or disk).

The process to create a template from a virtual machine snapshot has been simplified. Previously the user needed to create a virtual machine from a snapshot, and then create a template from the virtual machine. The new process enables the user to create the template directly from the snapshot.

This feature adds the ability to define a management network at the cluster level. This allows you to create a virtual Data Center with multiple clusters that have different management networks, which in turn allows you to use the same physical network with different VLANs defined for each management network.

This feature allows users to enable multiple console clients (for example, SPICE and VNC) for a virtual machine, so that users can switch clients without restarting the virtual machine. The virtual machine can now be configured with a "SPICE + VNC" console type, which enables this behavior. The "Console Options" dialog for a virtual machine enables protocols to be switched on a per-user basis.

A functionality has been added to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager to report the SPICE client version that a user connects to a console with. Because of this, it is now possible to block older SPICE clients from connecting to virtual machine graphical consoles. To configure this, use the engine-config tool to set the RemoteViewerSupportedVersions and RemoteViewerNewerVersionUrl fields within vdc_options.

It is now possible to track the number of days that a user has been attached to a pooled virtual machine by inspecting the 'Creation Date' in the 'Permission' sub-tab.

Virtual machine and template names only need to be unique within a data center, the names can be re-used in different data centers in the environment.

Previously, the DISK_STORAGE_MANIPULATION permission allowed users to perform live storage migration as standard. Now, a new permission, DISK_LIVE_STORAGE_MIGRATION, has been introduced to allow finer control over which users can perform live storage migration.
                    
Upgrading to a version that includes this fix (3.6.0 or 3.5.1) will grant the new permission to all roles that included the DISK_STORAGE_MANIPULATION permission (DataCenterAdmin, StorageAdmin, ClusterAdmin, and relevant custom roles) to maintain functionality.

The REST API can be used now to retrieve the complete .vv file with console connection information, allowing easier scripting of connecting to virtual machine graphical consoles.

A new plugin has been added to sos 3.2, the sosreport tool, so that information about the hosted-engine setup and high availability daemons is now collected by log collector.

Previously, user defined iptables rules were overwritten when the host was added to the Manager and the automatic configuration of the firewall was turned off. Now, when the automatic configuration of the firewall is turned off the iptables rules will not be rewritten.

In the User Portal, the following visual indicators have been added to indicate that the virtual machine console is in use:

1. The virtual machine background of an occupied console is grayed-out when not selected.

2. The text "console in use" is displayed in the virtual machine status description of an occupied virtual machine.

Using the remote-viewer tool to connect to an ovirt:// URI now displays a menu that allows the user to change the CD image inserted in the virtual machine. This makes it possible to change the inserted CD while the virtual machine is running, without the need to access the Administration Portal or the User Portal.

Events can now be dismissed and restored in the Administration Portal.

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager now periodically monitors the CA certificate, the Manager certificate, and host certificates, and reports via the event log when a certificate is about to expire.

The Manager also produces an alert for hosts when their certificates have expired. A new button in the Hosts tab allows the user to enroll a certificate for the host. The same action is exposed in the REST API, by sending a POST request to '/api/hosts/{host:id}/enrollcertificate'.

Two storage-space thresholds have been added for storage domains:

* WarningLowSpaceIndicator - configured as a percentage (0-100) of disk space. A storage domain with disk space below this threshold will display warning to the user and in the log, and

* CriticalSpaceActionBlocker - configured as an integer (in GB) between 0 and the MaxInteger, and can exceed the total space of the storage domain. A storage domain with disk space below this threshold will block all operations that consume storage space, even if the operation is temporary, and will display relevant warning to the user and in the log.
                    
These values can be configured when creating, editing, or importing a storage domain.

Previously, the Python SDK did not support authentication to a RHEV-M server that was configured with Kerberos and only supported authentication with a username and a password. Now, the Python SDK supports authentication using a previously obtained Kerberos ticket that is valid for the realm of the RHEV-M server. To authenticate using a Kerberos ticket first acquire the Kerberos ticket by using the kinit command, or another mechanism, then use the "kerberos=True" option in the constructor of the API object.

Previously, the CLI did not support authentication to a RHEV-M server that was configured with Kerberos and only supported authentication using a username and password. Now, the CLI supports authentication using a previously obtained Kerberos ticket by specifying the --kerberos command line option.

With this release, the Administration Portal's search function can filter disks by the "Wipe After Delete" property.

With this release, the request for 'LockScreen' can be configured to be ignored by changing the 'ignore_lock_screen_request value' to True in the guest agent configuration.

It is now possible to update the template for an existing virtual machine pool. This enables updated templates to be deployed to all virtual machines in the pool, and the next restarted virtual machine will be based on the new template version.

With this update, the default name for the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization management network has changed from 'rhevm' to 'ovirtmgmt'.

When importing a disk from a Glance storage domain via the REST API, the response will now contain the UUID of the disk created on the target storage domain.

Search query filtering has been added to the REST API to match functionality of the Web Admin Portal.

With this update XFS based storage for local storage domains is now supported on the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 is not required to use XFS based storage domains.

With this update, you can configure quotas using the REST API. New entities such as QuotaStorageLimit and QuotaClusterLimit were added to the quotas sub-collection. QuotaStorageLimit allows you to specify a quota policy for individual or all storage domains. QuotaClusterLimit allows you to specify the Memory and CPU limit for individual or all clusters in a data center.

The RHEV-M Virtual Appliance is now available as an rpm to simplify deployment of the self-hosted engine. When the rpm is installed, the hosted-engine deployment script will discover it and suggest to automatically configure the appliance.

Previously, users could remap the Ctrl+Alt+Del shortcut to Ctrl+Alt+End using the Console Options dialog in the Administration or the User Portal. With this enhancement, users can now use the engine-config utility with the 'RemapCtrlAltDelDefault' option to remap the shortcut keys. This global value can still be optionally overridden for each virtual machine using the Console Options dialog.

Previously, all OpenStack external providers like Neutron and Glance used the same Keystone authentication URL stored in the KeystoneAuthUrl configuration value. Now, a URL field has been added to provider configuration so that different OpenStack providers can use different Keystone authentication URLs.

The virt-viewer tool can now report the SPICE client version being used to connect to a console. This allows a minimum SPICE client version to be set using the engine-config tool, and older SPICE clients to be blocked from connecting to virtual machine graphical consoles.

With this enhancement, the RHEV-M appliance now uses cloud-init for initial virtual machine configuration instead of the first-boot dialog.

With this release, users can attach a cloud-init ISO image to automatically configure the RHEVM Appliance from hosted-engine setup.

With this enhancement, users can connect to Windows 8 and Windows 2012 virtual machines using the SPICE protocol without QXL drivers. Limitations include: no multiple monitors, graphics are not accelerated, etc.

In multiple-monitor setups, it is now possible to specify which monitors are to be used by a virtual guest, and which are to be reserved for the local machine. This is done by editing the ~/.config/virt-viewer/settings file.

It is now possible to populate the description of a new LUN disk with all, none, or part of the LUN id. The default setting uses the last four digits of the LUN id and can be configured via engine-config-manager. This value can be set to '-1' for the full LUN id to be used, or '0' for this feature to be ignored. A positive integer will populate the description with the corresponding number of characters of the LUN id.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager now supports Novell eDirectory with the RFC-2307 schema extension.

Some operating systems are not supported on older CPU architectures. For example, Windows 8 does not run on Conroe-based hosts. When a cluster is set to a certain CPU model, the unsupported operating systems will no longer be available in the 'New Virtual Machine' and 'Edit Virtual Machine' windows for that cluster.

This feature implements a command line access to a virtual machine's serial console using the SSH client. For more information, see 
https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Virtualization/3.6/html/Virtual_Machine_Management_Guide/sect-Starting_the_Virtual_Machine.html#Opening_a_Serial_Console_to_a_Virtual_Machine.

It is now possible to add memory to a virtual machine without having to shut it down first.

QEMU capabilities for auto-convergence and/or Xor Binary Zero Run-Length-Encoding (XBZRLE) can be used to reduce virtual machine downtime and improve convergence during migration. This is supported by hierarchical configuration in 3 levels: global (engine-config), cluster, and virtual machine.

This feature changes the way allocated MAC addresses are tracked. Previously, there was one global MAC address pool, from which all requests for MAC addresses were served. Now you can create several MAC address pools with different settings, and assign one of such pools to a certain data center. This allows each data center to have a different 'mac-space'. Pools can also be shared among multiple data centers.

When Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization configures a network on a host, it generates several ifcfg files with specific content. If a user wants to tweak the content by adding or removing any initscripts, they must deploy a hook script to do so whenever the ifcfg file is rewritten.

The example hook script will add the following entries to the ifcfg file of nic 'ens11' when ifcfg is modified:
  USERCTL=yes
  ETHTOOL_OPTS="autoneg on speed 1000 duplex full"

To add the hook script to VDSM hooks, place the file in /usr/libexec/vdsm/hooks/before_ifcfg_write, and ensure the VDSM has permissions to the file.

The VDSM checks this directory every time ifcfg configuration is changed, and executes each script in this directory.
As input to the script, the VDSM will pass the path to a json file containing the ifcfg file data, for example:

{
  "config": "DEVICE=ens13\nHWADDR=52:54:00:d1:3d:c8\nBRIDGE=z\nONBOOT=yes\nMTU=1500\nNM_CONTROLLED=no\nIPV6INIT=no\n",
  "ifcfg_file": "/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens7"
}

Modified ifcfg file contents (under the "config" entry) can be written to a json file, and will be used by VDSM as the new ifcfg file content.
If no file is given, VDSM will use the unmodified content.

The following is a description of the example hook script.

Reading in the data from the json file:

  hook_data = hooking.read_json()

Getting the value of the new ifcfg file content:

  config_data = hook_data['config']

Getting the name of the ifcfg file which will be modified:

  ifcfg_file = hook_data['ifcfg_file']

Modify and write the content of the ifcfg file:

  config_data += "USERCTL=yes\nETHTOOL_OPTS=\"autoneg on speed 1000 duplex full\"\n"
  hook_data['config'] = config_data
  hooking.write_json(hook_data)

The file also dumps the data read from the json file to file (/tmp/hook_data), to show the format of the input json file:

  with open("/tmp/hook_data",mode='w') as file:
      file.write( json.dumps(hook_data))

This update adds new fields representing information about hosts to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Reports capability, allowing users to use these fields in ad-hoc reports.

With this update, MOM has now been separated from VDSM, and runs as a standalone process that communicates with VDSM using XML-RPC over a UNIX socket. This makes it possible to reduce the number of threads that VDSM creates, and results in almost no busy threads in MOM, resolving an issue with the Python global interpreter lock and improving performance on high-end machines such as those with 100 or more CPUs.

UsbDk has been added to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization as a preferred alternative to usbclerk. UsbDk is a filter driver that is able to allow and disallow access to USB devices from spice-client on Windows machines. This allows virtual machines access to the client USB devices through SPICE client (remote-viewer) running on Windows machines.

A virtual machine's buffered or cached memory is now taken into account in the Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) process. Some applications, like the Oracle Directory Server, uses cached memory as permanent memory and never releases it. As a result, users need to take this memory into account when planning for memory requirements. The data is collected each minute, hour and day as a default and users can create ad hoc reports based on the collected data.

With this update the perf tool has been added to the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor to allow for better performance monitoring.

The status of a storage domain can now be reported by an external system. The status is set using the REST API, and the internal status (as reported by the Manager) and the external status (as reported by a third party) for each storage domain are displayed when a domain is selected in the Administration Portal user interface.

The Capacity Planning report has been added to Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 to track cluster capacity. This report tracks overall cluster allocations and shows details including number of hosts, number of virtual machines (running and configured), number of CPUs (configured, running and physical), memory size (configured, running and physical) including shared memory and ballooning, and storage size (amount allocated and used; configured, running) for defined disks and actual size per disk.

With this update virtual machines in the cluster level of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.6 run with the pc-i440fx-rhel7.2.0 machine type on x86 architecture and pseries-rhel7.2.0 on ppc64 architecture by default. This means that virtual machines can use all of the capabilities provided by these new machine types.

Windows 10 is now supported as a guest operating system (32 and 64 bit).

Previously, creating a new virtual machine would open the 'Guide Me' window, which offered a link to 'Configure Virtual Disks'. Now, this functionality is integrated in the 'New Virtual Machine' and 'Edit Virtual Machine' windows, and the 'Guide Me' window no longer opens in a virtual machine context.

With this update the search capability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has been improved so that virtual machines can be searched for based upon their virtual machine cluster compatibility level, custom virtual machine emulated-machine type, and CPU model.

It is now possible to view all active sessions through the Administration Portal. 'Guest Information' can be found under 'System' in tree mode.

With this update the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager provides a disk snapshot (volume) ID. This allows users to view the mapping of each Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization virtual machine's virtual disk to one or more data storage LUNs. This can be useful for troubleshooting storage performance issues. The disk snapshot (volume) IDs can be viewed in two places: Virtual Machines -> Snapshots -> Disks or Storage -> Disk Snapshots.

It is now possible to receive notifications when a virtual machine enters a paused state. The corresponding entry was added under VM Events in the Users -> Event Notifier -> Manage Events window.

With this update the total RX/TX byte statistics for the hypervisor and virtual machine network interfaces have been added to statistics ad hoc domains. This allows users the ability to calculate, for a specific time period, the RX/TX bytes used, per virtual machine or hypervisor interface.

This feature provides additional guest system information such as operating system, version, architecture, and the currently configured time zone.

Additionally, it shows a warning in form of an exclamation mark with a tool tip in the Administration Portal's virtual machine overview list when the operating system does not match the configured type, or if a Windows virtual machine timezone configured as a hardware timezone offset does not match the reported value.

This feature requires the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager Guest Agent to be installed on the guest operating system.

A health status field has been added to host and storage domain entities, which can be set and retrieved in the UI and the REST API.

It is now possible to directly boot a virtual machine from an ISO image directly over HTTPS without the need to have previously imported it on the ISO storage domain. This operation is performed via a VDSM hook. Please note that a stable HTTPS connection is required to avoid EIO errors.

With this update, it is now possible to change the allocation policy of disks imported from an export domain as part of importing a virtual machine. This allows users to specify the format and allocation policy of each disk. Note that `collapse_snapshots` needs to be set to true and the disk IDs should be the IDs of the existing disks that the user is importing.
                   
For example, to force one of the disks to be preallocated:
                  
    POST /storagedomains/{storagedomain:id}/vms/{vm:id}/import
    <action>
      <storage_domain>
        <name>mydata</name>
      </storage_domain>
      <cluster>
        <name>mycluster</name>
      </cluster>
      <vm>
        <disks>
          <disk id="792f8ca8-3932-429b-9660-006ba144bc72">
            <format>raw</format>
            <sparse>false</sparse>
          </disk>
        </disks>
        <snapshots>
          <collapse_snapshots>true</collapse_snapshots>
        </snapshots>
      </vm>
    </action>

Hosts now support more than two power management cards through the use of sequential and concurrent card configurations.

Previously, when a comment was added to an object, the Administration Portal displayed a yellow paper sheet icon in the "Comment" column. This has now been changed to render the actual comment.

It is now possible to specify a custom name for the disk and/or template when importing a Glance disk through the REST API.

The 'Start in Pause Mode' functionality of the Administration Portal has been added to the REST API. Users can now use the '<start_paused>true|false</start_paused>' value when configuring virtual machines.

Using the remote-viewer tool to connect to an ovirt:// URI now displays a menu that allows the user to change the CD image inserted in the virtual machine (VM). This makes it possible to change the inserted CD while the VM is running without the need to use Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization or the oVirt portal.

With this update, Microsoft Windows 10 is now supported as a guest operating system in Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. The required VirtIO-Win drivers for this operating system are also provided.

In administration portal it is now possible to open the create virtual machine dialog from the template list populated with the selected template.

This update provides a new python-unittest2 package, which is a required dependency for the python-mock package.

Previously, VDSM reported all channel devices as 'Unknown' device types with a warning. This was not correct and has now been fixed.

With this release, you can edit the alias of a disk image in the Import Image view when importing an image from Glance. Without the ability to change the alias, each import of the same image creates a disk with the same name (which is the default name for that disk). Now, an editable column named "Disk Alias" was added to the table of images which were chosen to be imported. Each image has its own default name, which has not changed and can be left as is. However, one can now edit each image alias before the import.

With this release, cloud-init packages are tracked in the reported list of installed packages on Linux distributions.

Previously, when users executed a solution step suggested by the Optimizer, if the solution wasn't doable, an error message was returned. This was confusing for users. With this update, if the full solution is not doable, the solution is still displayed but grayed out so it is clear to users that the full solution is not possible to implement at the time. Users can still read the suggested solution and manually implement parts of the solution that are doable.

This release allows editing of some self-hosted engine Manager VM fields (memory, CPU, and networking). The previous self-hosted engine version did not have a config file that the user was allowed to change to update the Manager VM settings. Now, direct editing of memory, CPU, and attached NICs directly from the Administration portal is supported. The configuration is flushed to all self-hosted engine nodes according to the OvfUpdateIntervalInMinutes config option (default: each 60 minutes). The config value can be changed to one minute (engine-config -s OvfUpdateIntervalInMinutes=1) if the user wishes to make this change instantaneous.
Note: There is a known issue with hotplug. The Administration portal will report hotplug errors (CPU, memory, and possibly disk) after editing. Those errors have no impact on the configuration transfer and the values will be properly applied once the Manager VM is restarted by self-hosted engine tooling (or manually).

To provide a way to configure gssapi using ticket cache for authz pool, a new security domain called 'oVirtKerbAAA' was added to JBoss configuration, which can be customized by using the following variables:

AAA_KRB5_CONF_FILE=path_to_krb5_conf
Specify the custom krb5.conf file. The default is /etc/ovirt-engine/krb5.conf
Java supports only one krb5 configuration, if the user changes this property, then manage-domains will stop working because its configuration is managed in /etc/ovirt-engine/krb5.conf.

AAA_JAAS_USE_TICKET_CACHE=true/false
Enable or disable using the ticket cache file for authentication.

AAA_JAAS_TICKET_CACHE_FILE=path_to_ticket_cache
Specify the custom ticket cache file. The default is /tmp/krb5cc_${UID}, where UID is the ID of the ovirt user.

AAA_JAAS_USE_KEYTAB=false/true
Enable or disable using the keytab file for authentication.

AAA_JAAS_KEYTAB_FILE=path_to_keytab_file
Specify the custom keytab file. The default is ${OVIRT_HOME}/krb5.keytab where OVIRT_HOME is home directory of ovirt user.

To use one of the features, the user has to create a new configuration file and specify the correct values for those variables, for example: /etc/ovirt-engine/engine.conf.d/99-jaas.conf.

To use the new security domain configuration from aaa-ldap, the user has to specify the correct JAASClientName (default is oVirtKerb). Therefore, to use this new configuration for authz pool, the user has to add following line to aaa-ldap authz configuration:

pool.authz.auth.gssapi.jAASClientName = oVirtKerbAAA

To use it for both authn and authz, the user has to add the following line to aaa-ldap configuration:

pool.default.auth.gssapi.jAASClientName = oVirtKerbAAA

The Memory Overcommitment Manager (MOM) now knows how to read the IO Quality of Service settings from metadata and set the respective ioTune limits to a running virtual machine's disk. This feature allows proper support for disk hot plug and changes to disk QoS for an already-running virtual machine.

With this enhancement, support for SNMP v3 traps was added. RHEV-M is now able to provide SNMP v2c and v3 traps. New SNMP related options which can be set along with the default values can be found at: /usr/share/ovirt-engine/services/ovirt-engine-notifier/ovirt-engine-notifier.conf.

This release provides better support for the Japanese keyboard layout.

It is now possible to edit the self-hosted engine Manager virtual machine.

Before version 3.6.5, a configuration value prevented the self-hosted engine Manager virtual machine from being edited because the functionality was not available. A plugin automatically changed the default configuration value from true to false, which prevented editing. The functionality to edit the self-hosted engine Manager virtual machine is now available, and therefore the plugin has been removed.

This package contains the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product documentation in both HTML and PDF formats. Once installed, the documentation is available from the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager landing page.

Users of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager are advised to upgrade to this updated package, which provides updated documentation.

Previously, cluster compatibility version upgrades were blocked if there was a running virtual machine in the cluster. Now, the user is informed about running/suspended virtual machines in a cluster when changing the cluster version. All such virtual machines are marked with a Next Run Configuration symbol to denote the requirement for rebooting them as soon as possible after the cluster version upgrade.

Fencing of HP iLO 3 and HP iLO 4 hosts via SSH is now supported.