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.

We’ve released the Beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (kernel-2.6.18-120.el5), including versions for x86, x86/64, Itanium, IBM POWER and System z. The Beta runs until January 6, 2009. We’ll highlight a few of the more interesting new features and updates below, but for full details, see the official announcement.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 Beta is the sheer size and scope of enhancements, which cover every aspect of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. The enhancements clearly illustrate the power of the open source development model to create new technology with breathtaking speed. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 will be provided to all subscribers for no additional charge, as part of their subscription service.

As with any Beta, the aim is to provide our customers and partners with the opportunity to sample and test new features of the release before it is finalized. So, bear in mind that things are still open to change before the final GA (General Availability) release. Also, the software should not be used for production environments or for performance testing. 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 recertified.
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With the recent release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2, the kickoff of the HP Technology Forum on Monday and the upcoming Red Hat Summit taking place later this week in Boston, Mass. — we wanted to share details about joint activity between Red Hat and HP.

Red Hat and HP together provide powerful integrated solutions for customers who want the confidence of deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux on robust certified systems with comprehensive services and seamless support.
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Shortly after purchasing the technologies from AOL/Netscape, we opened the source for Red Hat Directory Server in the summer of 2005. Since then, the Fedora Directory Server project has attracted attention and contributions from the community and is now also at the heart of a broader community effort around the central management of identity, policy and audit for the Unix and Linux world, called freeIPA.

Today’s 8.0 release of Red Hat Directory Server is built directly from those fully open source Fedora Directory Server bits and contains all of the contributions and community effort that went into that project. Part of the effort was around achieving full RPM compliance for Red Hat Directory Server, enabling organizations to now rely on the standard Red Hat Network update process for updates.
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Today Red Hat made some announcements, under an umbrella theme of Linux Automation. At first glance, this would seem surprising. But when you tear it apart, a focus on automation makes extreme sense.

Go back 10 years and look what was happening in the processor space. Price/performance of Intel CPUs was challenging the legacy RISC systems. Microsoft was the largest benefactor of this, while the OEMs clung to their high margin UNIX/RISC systems. Who could blame them.

In 2001 Red Hat squarely focused on the commercial enterprise systems business. The enabler for this was no longer solely price/performance of x86 systems. But the recognition that technically, Linux had matured to the point to not just be an alternative to UNIX/RISC, but actually a market leader. Enterprise Linux was born, along with pioneering a subscription model that would keep us focusing on customer satisfaction and service rather than just the initial sale.

Today, millions of servers around the world are powered by Enterprise Linux. The heroes being the IT departments which made this choice, challenging the legacy before it was mainstream. What now is the obvious choice due to performance and cost.

The last 6 years have been focused on UNIX migration, allowing x86 performance to be realized, and building software subscription capabilities. In the next chapter we believe that Enterprise Linux will continue to take share against Windows solely based on performance, stability, and cost. However, basically due to impatience we wish to accelerate what has already become a behavioral norm for IT.

Linux Automation. The ability to run any application, on any system, at any time. Allowing IT to simplify their IT infrastructure in the process. With the belief that undue complexity and over-architecture will have both short and long term costs.

Any Application.

The RHEL application world, at 3000+ certification strong, is growing at the rate of approximately a new application every day. Application choice is critical for IT. The stability of the RHEL platform, and its release-to-release continuity allows application growth to continue without disruption.

Anywhere.

The move to x86 marked an inflection point for IT from the traditional use of large RISC servers. Today, the footprint which makes up the IT arsenal looks increasingly differentiated, allowing the right server to be matched with the right task. Rack-mount. Blades. 128-way SMP. Mainframes. PowerPC and Itanium. Virtualized servers based on VMWARE and RHEL 5. We want to enable IT choice, not dictate it. And deliver a consistent RHEL platform across each which drives IT simplicity, while allowing ISVs to reach all markets at low cost. Today we announce that the platform choice for RHEL has extended one further. Dedicated and virtual servers are now joined by a 3rd twin, with RHEL being available as an on-demand choice as part of Amazon EC2. With a supported ISV catalog 3000+ strong.

Anytime.

When the first version of Enterprise Linux was released in May of 2002, a physical system and its applications typically had a one to one affinity. The models of moving applications from one system to another was usually only realized at failover time, requiring costly hardware and hard labor to realize. Today the technology is in place to flip this. RHEL5 with integrated virtualization has built application mobility into the OS. Transparent to all applications on the platform. The resources apportioned to an application can be changed on demand. Applications can be live migrated to another system, ending the scheduling of planned outages. High availability delivered to all applications on the platform, at low cost.

To the 1000s of customers to whom Linux, OSS, and Red Hat has earned their trust, we thank you. The journey of the impact of open source software on your businesses has just begun.

Linux Automation. Any application. Anywhere. Anytime.

Now that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has been available for a few months, it seems like a good time to stand back and take a higher-level look at the new member of the server family – Advanced Platform.

In previous releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we had AS and ES server variants. Have you noticed how nobody is mourning that we dropped them? Although they don’t exist with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, these variants were vital to establishing the Enterprise Linux product line. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the two variants was that they were technically identical. The same package set, same updates, same everything — except for a single file that contained the AS or ES name. Keeping them the same was very important because it meant that an ISV only needed to certify his application once, whereupon it was certified on both variants. » Read more

It’s only been four weeks since the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and we’re happy to report that as of today, we already have 90 partners and 132 applications certified to run on the latest version of our operating system. Leading up to the official availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on March 14, our ISV team worked closely with our partners to provide early access to our beta program, allowing our partners to test, provide feedback via Bugzilla and certify their applications prior to general availability. The 132 applications now certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 range from CRM and Databases to Security and Storage solutions. For more on these certified applications, take a look at this Red Hat Magazine article.
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Everyone seems to know that the big buzz around Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform is the integration of virtualization at no extra charge. But there are many other enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 too. As you may or may not know, Red Hat is arguably the leading company when it comes to contributions to the Linux kernel and some of the 1,200 packages that make up a distribution. As an aside, We are always disappointed that people think Red Hat Enterprise Linux is merely a Linux operating system. They do not realize that well over 1,000 other components are also included and fully supported. Not only the really popular ones like the Apache web server, and the Samba seamless file and print services for Windows and other SMB/CIFS, and not only MySQL, and perl, and PHP, but on and on. Every one is supported, updated and well-integrated.
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