Today Red Hat released the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta (kernel-2.6.18-155.el5), with versions for x86, x86/64, Itanium, IBM POWER and System z. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta release includes a variety of new features and capabilities, combined with enhancements in virtualization, storage/filesystem, security and developer tools. As with any Beta, our goal is to provide customers and partners with the opportunity to sample and test new features of the release before it’s finalized.

The most exciting new capability in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta is the incorporation of KVM-based virtualization, in addition to existing Xen-based virtualization. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 provides the first commercial-strength implementation of KVM, which is developed as part of the upstream Linux kernel. Xen-based virtualization, of course, remains fully supported for the life of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family. In addition to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta release today, last week Red Hat also announced the availability of the Beta release of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops and the standalone, KVM-based Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor.

An important feature of any Red Hat Enterprise Linux update is that kernel and user APIs are unchanged, so that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 applications do not need to be rebuilt or re-certified. This situation extends to virtualized environments: with a fully integrated hypervisor, the application binary interface (ABI) consistency offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux means that applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on physical machines are also certified when run in virtual machines. So the portfolio of thousands of certified applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux applies to both environments.

While KVM virtualization is a major theme for this Beta release, customers will also benefit from advances in performance, security and developer tools to benefit both virtual and physical environments.

For full details on the new features in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 Beta release, please see the release notes. Here are some additional highlights:

Virtualization enhancements.

• KVM hypervisor
• Hardware support (SRIOV, IOMMU, VT-d):
  With this release Red Hat is introducing support for SRIOV (Single Root I/O for Virtualization). This feature aims to improve transaction throughput performance in virtual environments by taking advantage of PCI cards that can be shared by multiple virtual machines at one time without creating a throughput bottleneck. These throughput improvements combine with previous CPU and memory performance enhancements to allow customers to further consolidate workloads to lower their costs. SRIOV works with either IOMMU or VT-d in AMD and Intel platforms respectively.
• VDI SPICE protocol enablers:
  This software, unique to Red Hat, offers better response times for graphic/screen rendering by adaptively taking advantage of either client or host capabilities. This leads to better CPU utilization, enabling improved VDI consolidation ratios, without the need for expensive special hardware.
• Libvirt:
  perl interface for libvirt (new)
• kernel:
  Improved clock management when Red Hat Enterprise Linux is deployed on a VMware platform.

Storage / FileSystem

• New Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) utilities for management of FC instances on Ethernet
• Clustered Samba (Technology Preview)

Security

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 is a FIPS-140 certification target

Developer/Sysadmin

• Kernel tracepoints (Technology Preview), coupled with tracepoint support in Systemtap. This release provides user-space backtrace support, complementing kernel-space backtracing that was provided in previous releases. Systemtap provides a powerful, comprehensive performance troubleshooting tool.
• New CIM support for DHCP services.

Getting involved
We maintain a public mailing list for communication during Beta. You are welcome to subscribe to these lists and keep up-to-date with latest developments. Announcements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux are posted to rhelv5-announce. Public discussions on the Beta occur on rhelv5-beta-list.

All subscribing Red Hat customers can download the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 beta via Red Hat Network today.

Grab some popcorn, turn down the lights and gather around your computer screen as we announce the premiere of Red Hat Stories. A collection of 16 short videos, Red Hat Stories feature company leaders from around the world discussing who we are, what we do and how we do it.

* We start with “The Red Hat Way” video, giving insight into who we are as a company.
* The series then moves to “The Value of Red Hat in Jim’s Words” with Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO, describing how the open source development model, our enterprise-class software, a customer-friendly business model and the open source architecture add up to a better way for customers.
* Next is the “Technologies” series, including an overview video on our technologies and deep dives into virtualization, middleware, management, performance and services.
* The “Subscription Model” series highlights the value of a subscription, including supporting videos on the subscription ecosystem and support.
* Lastly, the “Liberating Innovation” series provides an overview of our efforts in liberating innovation, and supporting stories on open standards, software licensing and copyleft, software patent challenges, and promoting open governments.

But, really, why just read about it when you could watch the videos? View the Red Hat Stories now: www.redhat.com/stories.

Today, Red Hat posted the official agenda for the Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Chicago, Sept. 1-4, 2009. The jam-packed agenda features six tracks and keynotes from Red Hat’s Jim Whitehurst, Paul Cormier, Brian Stevens, and the NYSE’s Steve Rubinow, to help you get the most out of your trip.

Want to learn about the latest in open source virtualization, infrastructure, security, messaging and desktop technology? Check out the What’s New track!

Want to be the first to know what’s in the works from Red Hat and industry partners? The What’s Next track has you covered!

Are you an IT professional looking for additional ways to optimize your open source investment? Decoding the Code is for you!

Looking to reduce IT costs and increase your competitive edge through open source? Check out the Carve out Costs track!

Do you need an open source strategy to help give your IT ecosystem a competitive edge? The “Red Hat Security Advisory Secrets Revealed!” session on the Open Source for IT Leaders track is just one way we’ll show you how open source can provide a more secure option as your organization grows.

Still wondering how Red Hat can transform your business? We’ve got a track just for you! The Red Hat in Reality track gives you the chance to learn best practices and experience demos of open source solutions that can give your business a competitive advantage in the real world.

To see the full agenda and abstracts of each Red Hat Summit and JBoss World session, visit here.

To learn more about the 2009 Red Hat Summit and JBoss World in Chicago, visit here.

We hope to see you in Chicago!

JBoss Solution Providers and ISVs continue to deliver value to their customers through the JBoss portfolio. And we know that to grow a strong partner ecosystem, Red Hat must continue to enable our partners. One of the ways we are doing that is through update-briefings and related web-training sessions like those scheduled here.

To that end, we will be hosting a series of one hour online “Partner-Only” briefings the week of July 20th that will give participants an overview of the JBoss roadmap, a look into what’s in store for the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 5.0 family, and discuss what Red Hat is doing to promote our partner ecosystem.
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Cloud computing is a hot topic today, and so all sorts of companies, technologies, and industries are trying to align themselves within the framework of cloud computing. Two common terms that people often associate with cloud computing are grid computing and utility computing. But, it’s often unclear how cloud, utility, and grid computing relate to each other—if at all. It’s also often unclear what people mean when they use these terms. For example, the US Government has a two-page document trying to define just cloud computing.

One way to sort through all this confusion is to go back to origins. Because these terms are used so commonly now, it’s easy to forget that cloud computing, grid computing and utility computing are metaphors. They are figures of speech designed to help us think about different concepts. So, rather than go into great detail in defining these concepts (we’ll leave that to the US Government), let’s take a look at what these metaphors indicate and see how that helps us think about how cloud, utility and grid fit together:

• Cloud computing: Cloud computing is about treating your computational workload like a cloud. It’s out there in the sky, somewhere—distant from you. It’s sort of fluffy and fuzzy, and you don’t care too much about its details. It’s just a big white blob, and the point is that you don’t need to know any more about it. Also, because you don’t need to know any more about it, this means that you can run any type of workload or heterogeneous job in the cloud. You shouldn’t be locked into a certain set of capabilities by moving to the cloud.
• Grid computing: Grid computing visualizes a large two-by-two lattice structure—a grid! It combines a large number of individual computational nodes and assembles them into a larger, cohesive unit which can solve a computational problem. Grids are typically uniform in structure, and grid computing implies distributing a computational job across a wide number of individual, uniform computers assembled together. Grid computing visualizes the interlinks between a large number of computers assembled together for a single purpose. It is good at solving problems that distribute out amongst its individual nodes. (Note that node is itself a metaphor. A node is a “centering point of component parts.”)
• Utility computing: Utility computing is about treating computing power like a water utility or electric utility. Computing power is a commodity you can turn on and use as you need it. Then, at the end of the month, you pay a bill for how much you used. If you require a lot of computational power, you just turn on more and pay more. If you don’t use any of your utility, you might pay just a maintenance fee. Additionally, you can use your utility for whatever purpose you want. When you buy electricity from your electric utility, it doesn’t matter whether it’s for powering a CD player, a stove or a shaver—it just works. Utility computing should be the same.

Now that we’ve loosely described these terms, let’s see how they might fit together and how we can think about technology solutions in their context. First of all, it should be clear that cloud computing, grid computing and utility computing are not the same thing—even though lots of vendors would like to fit their products into the cloud computing category. But, it should also be clear that these things can work together. If you’ll excuse the mixed metaphors: A Grid of Clouds can provide a powerful Utility.

Let’s make this concrete by using Red Hat Enterprise MRG as an example. Red Hat Enterprise MRG integrates Messaging, Realtime and Grid technologies to provide a powerful distributed computing platform. MRG’s Grid scheduler, which is based on Condor, is designed to provide the ability to schedule any computational job or application to virtually any computational resource available—including public clouds like Amazon EC2, private/hybrid clouds built on virtualization technology or bare metal machines like dedicated servers or idle desktop workstations.

Let’s say that you have an application, say a Web server, that you want to run in the cloud. In other words, you want to be able to run the Web server but not think about where it’s actually running—it’s out there somewhere doing what you need it to do, but you don’t really care about the details or managing the underlying infrastructure yourself. You also want to run this Web server as if it were on a utility—if you need more Web servers, you just plug them in. And, you don’t want to have to plug your Web server into a Web-server-only jack—all your applications should work the same way in drawing computing power, and they should all work with the amount of power they require to function well.

Red Hat Enterprise MRG aims to allow you to accomplish all this by using MRG’s grid scheduler to schedule your Web server and other applications to run. MRG will then go out and acquire appropriate resources for you to run these jobs. It could be in your own private cloud built with Red Hat’s virtualization technology since MRG integrates with virtualization. Or, it could be on bare metal, or it could be at Amazon EC2 if you have no available capacity in your local data center. If you need additional Web servers, you can just schedule them with MRG’s grid scheduler and it will run them for you on an appropriate resource. If you need to consolidate or shut down Web servers because you no longer need as much capacity, MRG can manage that for you. And, if you have a job that needs to use tremendous computing power at once (many computers behind the scenes), MRG is designed to do that for you too because grid schedulers are good at that.

Going back to the concepts of clouds and grids, MRG demonstrates that a cloud provides access to a set of resources for an application. In this example, that set of resources is Web-serving capacity—whether at Amazon EC2 or in a local data center or elsewhere. A grid in this case, then, is a specific set of these web-serving resources. And, MRG’s grid scheduler schedules and manages this workload across specific cloud resources.

Because Red Hat Enterprise MRG includes the ability to talk to public clouds and integrate with virtualization (a foundational technology for building clouds), it enables users to treat their clouds as true utilities—sources of computational power that are available as needed, no matter the source. So, how do cloud, grid, and utility computing relate? To mix metaphors even more, you can build a utility grid across and through a variety of clouds.

Advancements and enhancements are being made every day in many key areas of virtualization technologies. The Fedora Project is on the cutting edge and Fedora 11 showcases recent enhancements to virtualization technology that focus in on management, performance and security.

Fedora 11 includes many new features, one of which is a redesign of ‘virt-manager’; an end-to-end desktop UI for managing virtual machines. The ‘virt-manager’ feature allows the user to focus more on managing virtual machines and less on the backend, no matter what type of virtualization technology they are using. The new features within “virt-manager” include:

• a new VM creation wizard,

• improved support for host-to-host migration of VMs,

• an interface for physical device assignment for existing VMs, easing allocation of physical resources tied to VMs,

• an upgraded statistics display that shows fine grained disk and network I/O stats, and

• improved VNC authentication to connect to VMs, which allow clients to securely connect to remote VMs.

You can learn more about this innovative new tool at http://virt-manager.et.redhat.com/.
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I’d like to think I’m pretty tech savvy for a CEO and have always been an early adopter of the latest and greatest tech innovations. It comes as no shock to those who know me well that I spent yesterday evening taking Fedora 11 for a test drive. I’m not ashamed to admit that I count down the days until the latest release of Fedora comes out with the same level of anticipation that my kids have when they know their birthday is coming up soon. As the title of this blog notes, one word sums up my Fedora 11 experience – wow!!!

There is so much to be excited about from improved virtualization to ext4. The latest enhancements were apparent before I even ran Fedora 11. The downloading experience was the fastest I’ve seen on the first day for previous releases. And, Fedora 11 is so easy to install that even my non-techy CEO counterparts could run Fedora 11 with ease.

On the theme of speed, I installed Fedora 11 on a pretty old machine at home and the boot is amazing. It’s almost too fast — I didn’t get a chance to fully enjoy the new graphics during boot! I’ve also installed Fedora 11 on a HP2133 netbook. It works great and handles fonts on a small screen beautifully.

Several of the advances in Fedora 11 are “under the hood” and I look forward to (and my wife is dreading) this weekend, when I can spend more time trying out Fedora 11.

Fedora continues to do a great job of fulfilling its role as a community R&D lab, and Red Hat as a major contributor benefits immensely from each new release of Fedora. Community participation is a bedrock principle of how Red Hat works, and directly equates to our increased ability to focus on the work that is vital for our customers.

Thank you to the entire Fedora community for a fantastic new release!

With summer fast approaching many people are wrapping up the traditional school year and making plans for summer vacations. However, there’s no better time than the present to continue learning and to grow professional skills. Especially during the difficult economic climate where holding certifications like Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) or Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT) are increasingly important for IT professionals and the organizations that rely on these pros to help reduce costs.

Here are 10 reasons why making training and certification a plan for this summer should be at the top of your to-do list:

1. Interest in open source is growing.
   Organizations across the private sector, government and individuals use open source. Just take a look at Red Hat’s recent Open Source Index study comparing and contrasting open source activity and environment across 75 countries. We expect that organizations want to ensure their employees have the skills and experience to utilize the latest open source technologies.
2. 10 years and counting….Red Hat training and certification can add to your skill set.
   With 10 years of experience, Red Hat Training is well-qualified to ramp up your skills and enhance overall marketability to potential employers. Red Hat IT training and certifications hold weight with hiring managers. Many seasoned IT professionals recognize the value Red Hat delivers in helping organizations reduce IT costs.
3. More than half a million trained.
   You’ll be in good company as more than 500,000 people have been trained over the lifetime of Red Hat Training and Certification.

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Today at the Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Conference, Red Hat is announcing that the JBoss Community Portal project has formed a strategic partnership with eXo, producers of the eXo Portal. eXo has been developing portal, content and collaboration solutions since 2003 and was recently named a Cool Vendor in Content Management, 2009 by Gartner.
» Read more

Today, the community-driven and Red Hat-sponsored Fedora Project shows the latest in a line of innovative and compelling distribution releases with Fedora 11, code-named “Leonidas.” This release, like its predecessors, is the culmination of over six months of work by the Fedora community. It combines the efforts of volunteers, Red Hat engineers, and many upstream communities into a leading-edge distribution that anyone can download, use and redistribute for free.

Twice a year, the Fedora Project releases a new version of Fedora with a projected lifetime of about a year. This quick release cycle results in consistent development and integration of the latest in open source technologies. That makes Fedora useful not just to hobbyists and enthusiasts, but also to those looking for a sneak peek at technologies that may be found later in Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
And Fedora 11 contains the broadest set of features yet for a Fedora release, including:

• New fingerprint reader support that makes biometric support easy and well-integrated

• Automatic font and mimetype installation that downloads support as needed for foreign-language documents and other content types

• New IBus input method system that makes it easy to switch locales without having to restart a session

• Improved kernel modesetting features for more video cards, including many models of Intel, ATI and NVidia

• Support for the latest filesystems like ext4, with much higher device and file size limits, and faster consistency checking

• Improved virtualization features such as a more flexible and interactive console, and a rewritten VM creation wizard

• MinGW cross-compiler tool set for creating Windows executables using the Fedora distribution

Check out the release video; that features Fedora Project Leader Paul Frields and Red Hat Community Architecture manager Max Spevack, talking about how open source evolves in Fedora. To read more about this release of Fedora visit the F11 tour on the Fedora wiki.