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.

Network Products Guide, an industry publication on information technologies and solutions, named the winners of its 2009 Product Innovation Awards this week, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 achieved top honors in the Operating Systems category.

The annual Product Innovation awards program “recognizes and honors worldwide vendors for their innovative and groundbreaking products that are bringing essential and incremental changes and are setting the bar higher for others in all areas of information technology,” according to Network Products Guide.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux released the third upgrade to its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform in January 2009, driving innovation through increased virtualization scalability, expanded hardware platform support, including support to Intel’s new Nehalem architecture, and incorporation of Java technologies with OpenJDK, a high-performance, fully open source implementation of Java Server Edition 6. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 release also included over 150 other additions and updates. The platform is developed using the open source development model, an approach which drives rapid innovation, and is sold by subscription to deliver continuous value to customers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was the first open source solution to deliver commercial-quality virtualization fully integrated into the operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has achieved a number of recent accolades, including:

• 2009 Datamation Product of the Year for the second consecutive year in the Enterprise Linux category
• SYS-CON Virtualization Conference & Expo Show Awards:
  • Best Overall Virtualization Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform
  • Best Server Virtualization Solution: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Platform
  • Best Greener IT Product: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

See more on these awards here.

For more information on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit here.

Visit the Red Hat booth #857 at Interop in Las Vegas, Nev. this week to hear more about Red Hat’s enterprise-class solutions.

Unless you’ve been stuck on a time-traveling island for the past few years, you can’t fail to have noticed that the hype behind such “next-generation” approaches as SOA, Web Services and REST has been simplified under the banner of cloud computing. The danger is that those who have traveled the well-worn Hype Cycle will simply discard this latest set of buzzwords (e.g., Platform As a Service and Infrastructure as a Service) as just another example of analyst-driven or vendor-driven marketing. However, the reality is significantly different. As with the other “hype-driven” terms mentioned previously, cloud has been incubating within the industry and academia for many years. Its roots can be traced back beyond grid computing (data grids as well as process grids) through ubiquitous computing and beyond. For example, in the early 1990s the European Union was funding research projects into utilizing a network of PlayStation One’s as a cheap pool of processors that could host services (typically ones needed graphical processing capabilities) on demand.

So just what is cloud and why is Red Hat a key player? To answer the first question it sometimes seems easier to try to catch a cloud! Because of its background, there tend to be several different definitions of cloud computing. But in general we shall assume that cloud represents a way to provision an array of Web-based services aimed at allowing users to access a range of capabilities on a pay-as-you-go basis, where the hardware and administrative investment is met by the cloud provider. This is in stark contrast to the traditional methods, where the end user had to provision and manage the hardware and software required to execute these services. With cloud comes the ability to give to end users across the world the illusion of low-entry-barrier, virtually infinite compute power at a fraction of the cost (in fact they only pay when they use this power and no longer need to be concerned about hardware investments languishing idle for most of the time.)

From an IT perspective, this is incredibly important. Very few companies can afford to buy all of the hardware they need, let alone administer it 24×7, especially as they grow. Peaks and troughs in usage make it difficult to know precisely what hardware is required to obtain an optimal level: buy too much and it remains unused a lot of the time; buy not enough and you cannot cope with additional demand. Cloud offers a solution to this that allows IT to invest in their own hardware and “plug in” to the cloud for additional on-demand requirements. In fact when people talk about the cloud today they are typically referring to public clouds or external clouds, i.e., those that exist outside of the corporate firewall. However, private clouds or internal clouds (within the firewall) are more likely to be the biggest users of cloud services for very important reasons: security and trustworthiness (where your data resides is often more important than how you access it). That’s not to suggest public clouds are not useful: far from it as has already been mentioned. But cloud users who are only interested in public clouds are likely to be the minority as adoption grows. The integration of public and private clouds is inevitable.

As with real (weather) clouds, clouds don’t just pop into existence like some exotic particle in physics. They need the right set of circumstances to come together in order for them to exist. At a minimum they need the right low-level infrastructure (VM and operating system) to support clustering of machines that have to be able to cope with arbitrary service requirements (this is often called Infrastructure-As-A-Service). Then of course you’ll need a way of developing applications for the cloud (Platform-As-A-Service). From a Red Hat/JBoss perspective we are working with many others in driving the understanding, adoption, interoperability and standardization of cloud computing at all of these levels. When you deploy on a Linux-based cloud, chances are that you’re using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. When you deploy your POJO’s into a cloud, you may well be using JBoss Application Server. As with SOA, open source is rapidly becoming key to opening up the cloud to everyone and not simply keeping it as the domain of the select few. Furthermore open source infrastructure technologies for cloud computing offer transparency and view of code and APIs in an effort to ensure strong interoperability from the start – no hidden APIs, no traps. Red Hat is uniquely positioned to help drive this adoption, with components that are needed at all levels of the cloud. For example, the work we’re doing around cloud-based data caching with Infinispan, or the high-performance messaging with Red Hat Enterprise MRG (of which JBoss Messaging is now a key element). In the future we expect to make more cloud announcements as we expand our vision and continue to develop these components into solutions in collaboration with our partners. Open source is a natural fit for this new growing market area.

Additionally, we expect that other open source projects and suppliers will continue to develop cloud technologies to break down the industry’s current barriers. We are inviting participants across the industry to join us in presenting new ideas and emerging open source cloud technologies at the Open Source Cloud Computing Forum that Red Hat will host on July 22, 2009. Submit ideas to present here.