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.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 released

Today, it was released a next minor version of Red Hat's flagship Linux distribution RHEL 5.4. Here it is a brief summary of new features and updates:

• KVM hypervisor - Full support of Kernel-based Virtual Machine is included now. XEN support is included as well, but you can't use both XEN and KVM at the same time. Each hypervisor requires different kernel. You need to have 64b machine to run KVM. It supports RHEL 3/4/5 or Windows XP/2003/2008 as guests.
• KVM paravirtualized drivers - They are available for Windows XP/2003/2008 in package virtio-win.
• FUSE support - New version includes modules for Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) and related utilities. Support for the XFS was added as well. It icnludes updates of CIFS and EXT4 filesystems.
• Infiniband drivers - It contains some portions of prepared Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) 1.4.1.

New release of RHEL contains many other updates and enhancements which aren't mentioned here. For more details read the RHEL 5.4 official release notes.

Red Hat prefers KVM to XEN! No doubt!

It's unbelievable but it's true! Red Hat in cooperation with AMD performs virtual machine live migration between different platforms - from Intel CPU to AMD cpu. You know, there are many difficulties to achieve it - like various extensions, instructions and so on.

So far, it was possible to migrate between processors of different family of one vendor only. Now, Red Hat can do it with RHEL and KVM which means Red Hat confirmed the replacement of XEN with KVM definitely. I wrote about it a few months ago here. The whole video story is published at youtube.

Red Hat prefers KVM to XEN?

Wow, the situation around Red Hat's attitude to the virtualization maze seems to be more clear now. I thought that Red Hat is going to support solutions based on XEN hypervisor. In 2007, they released RHEL 5.0 and it was their first distro with integration of XEN hypervisor. And I was looking forward to it.

But Red Hat considered the XEN to be immature as well. According to the article published at www.virtualization.info the main reason for such decision was acquisition of XenSource by Citrix and the collaboration between Microsoft and Novell and other vendors interested in XEN.

A few days ago, Red Hat unveiled their new virtualization strategy based on embedding the KVM hypervisor to their RHEL distro. The official announcement is published here and summarized some advantages of it.

I think it is interesting news but with many unanswered but important questions. Will they support both of hypervisors? Or are they going to support KVM only since now? What about their customers who already adopted the XEN in their environments? In my opinion, it will be quite difficult to make it mainstream. Let's wait and we will see...