Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 - what's new?

It's a few months since RHEL 5.5 was released (march, 2010). Despite this, I would like to point out the major changes and additions compared to the previous release RHEL 5.4. So what's new:
  • Kickstart installation - it is possible to exclude package groups in the same way like single packages.
  • KVM guests and Cluster Suite - management of KVM based virtual guests with Cluster Suite is supported.
  • SPICE - RHEL 5.5 includes components of Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments which is competitor for VMware's PCoIP or Citrix's HDX.
  • PCI passthrough - physical PCI devices attached to virtual guests are working better.
  • Huge page support - it is extended to virtual guests with libvirt.
  • Windows 7 support - new samba3x packages supporting Windows 7 are included.
For more details read the RHEL 5.5 official release notes.