Chapter 1. Introducing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisors

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) Hypervisor is a compact, full-featured virtualization platform for quickly and easily deploying and managing virtual machines. The RHEV Hypervisor is part of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization suite. The RHEV Hypervisor is designed for integration with the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers and the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops.

The RHEV Hypervisor can be installed from USB storage devices, CD-ROMs, DVDs, pre-installed by an OEM or provisioned with PXE.

The RHEV Hypervisor is based on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM). KVM is an advanced and efficient virtualization hypervisor implemented as a Linux kernel module. As KVM is a kernel module, it leverages the existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux kernel and benefits from the default kernel's extensive testing, device support and flexibility.

The RHEV Hypervisor is constructed using a subset of packages from Red Hat Enterprise Linux along with several special RHEV packages. RHEV is certified for all hardware certified for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (except where noted, refer to Chapter 3, Requirements and limitations of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisors).