Red Hat Steps Up With RHEL 5.2

Published by editors | Filed under Server News

Red Hat’s released version 5.2 of its Enterprise Linux, shortly after the release of Fedora 9. I’ve read new in Information Week that the first thing Daniel Riek, product manager for RHEL, noted is that 5.2 is a refresh, a minor release to enable new hardware. A lot of those “minor” changes make RHEL all the more appealing to those running data centers or performing server consolidation.

Many of the new things are related to virtualization improvements, like support for systems with up to 64 logical CPUs, as well as NUMA and CPU frequency scaling controls. This last item helps keep consolidation servers running that much cooler and save that much more power, something weighing heavily on everyone’s mind these days.

Another key improvement to RHEL’s virtualization comes in the form of the libvirt virtualization and management API. This library’s hypervisor-neutral can integrate with a variety of management suites such as IBM / Tivoli’s. The timing’s right for adding these features, especially sinceMicrosoft is all the closer to rolling out Hyper-V as a solution of its own.

“The mix of virt features in RHEL is a strong hint that virtualization on enterprise-class Linux needs to work out of the box in both directions. The distro has to work well with hypervisors or VM apps and be a good virtualization host as well; it translates out to that many more places that the distro can be dropped and will always land on its feet” is the conclusion that author of the articles makes.