Qumranet, a technology startup began the development of KVM and was subsequently acquired by Red Hat in 2008. Red Hats first release was v 2.1 in 2009 with an update in 2010 which included the virtual technical workstation capabilities. The 3.0 release in 2012 was a major milestone in porting the RHV-M manager from .NET to Java (and fully open-sourcing) alongside other improvements.
RHV 3.1 removed all requirements of any Windows-based infrastructure, but still support Microsoft Active Directory for user authentication, administration, VDI, etc. RHV 3.1 also provided a RESTful API for integration.
Since RHV 3.2, Red Hat has provided many feature enhancements, improvements in scale, enhanced reliability and integration points (hooks, OpenStack etc) documented in the matrix.

While not as large as e.g. the VMware and Microsoft ecosystem there are a large number of ISVs with products currently integrated into RHV, including Acronis for Backup/DR/Migration, Symantec Storage Foundation and Tintri for Storage, BMC TrueSight for capacity optimization, Igel, Wyse and other thin client vendors have SPICE (RHVs remote viewing protocol) integrated in some of their product offerings. Major OEM hardware vendors like IBM and HP support RHV (e.g. IBM has part numbers for all of RHVs subscription offerings). Additionally RHV enables third party plug-ins Recent plug-ins include:
- BMC connector for RHV-M REST API to collect data for managing RHV boxes without having to install an agent.
- HP OneView for Red Hat Virtualization (OVRHV) UI plug-in that that allows you to seamlessly manage your HP ProLiant infrastructure from within RHV Manager and provides actionable, valuable insight on underlying HP hardware (HP Insight Control plug-in is also available).
- NetApp Virtual Console enables rapid cloning of NetApp virtual machines, and allows NFS storage discovery, provisioning and modification from within Red Hat Virtualization Manager.
- Symantec Storage Foundation that delivers storage Quality of Service (QoS) at the application level and maximizes your storage efficiency, availability and performance across operating systems. This includes Symantec Cluster Server provides automated disaster recovery functionality to keep applications up and running. Cluster Server enables application specific fail-over and significantly reduces recovery time by eliminating the need to restart applications in case of a failure.
- Tenable Network Securitys Nessus Audit for RHV-M which queries the RHV API and reports that information within a Nessus report.
- Ansible RHV module that allows you to create new instances, either from scratch or an image, in addition to deleting or stopping instances on the RHV platform.

Visit marketplace.redhat.com/RHV to learn more about these plug-ins and RHV’s ecosystem of partner