March 14 is the day Red Hat Inc.will release the next version of it’s operating system RHEL 5 (Red Hat Enterprise Linux).
RHEL 5 implements a totally integrated Xen-based server and storage virtualization solution, by combining server virtualization with Red Hat's clustering support. In addition, RHEL 5 comes with a virtualization manager that should make installing and administering Xen virtual machines much easier.
With this version, RHEL moves from Linux kernel version 2.6.9 to 2.6.18. In addition, Red Hat says it has made extensive enhancements to the operating system's network and I/O subsystems, to improve performance and scalability, as well as the kernel ...including a little back-porting from 2.6.19.
The new distribution will also include comprehensive security profiles and improved compiler and runtime buffer management technologies. In addition, RHEL 5's SELinux (security enhanced Linux) is much easier to deploy and maintain than it was in RHEL 4.
For greater availability, the new RHEL will boast failover at either the application or virtual machine level by the combined use of Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Global File System, and Cluster Logical Volume Manager. According to Red Hat, this technology allows application data to be securely accessed and shared by any guest from any system.
Additionally, with RHEL 5 Red Hat is expanding its horizons. According to RHEL product marketing director Joel Berman, customers will now be able to buy one-off copies of "RHEL Client," which is the new Red Hat Linux desktop.
While Red Hat believes the Client would best be deployed in a business environment, where the RHEL desktops can easily be maintained by a local IT-managed RHN (Red Hat Network), it will also be available for individual users and SMBs (small-to-medium businesses).
Starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the entire stack of tools which installs and updates software is now based on yum . This includes everything from the initial install via anaconda to the host software management tools like system-config-packages to the updating of your system via Red Hat Network. New functionality such as the ability to use a yum repository to supplement the packages we provide with your in-house software, plugins to provide additional behavior tweaks and some of the various new utilities which you can take advantage of will be discussed.
It also appears that RHEL 5 will be a fast Linux distribution in some configurations -- very fast. In a report by Nick Carr, an RHEL product marketing director, RHEL 5 set a new world record for a 16-way SMP (Symmetric Multiprocessing) configuration on an IBM POWER system. That result was 78 percent faster than the previous Linux record holder. RHEL also showed its heels to both Sun Solaris and HP/UX -- it was 210 percent faster than the former, and 132 percent faster than the latter.
With over two million installations of Fedora, RHEL's community brother in the Linux distribution family, it's clear that RHEL is truly red hot, as Red Hat readies it for its latest unveiling.
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