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Red Hat Releases RHEL 5.1, Includes Virtualization

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the you-can't-beat-better-toys dept.

eldavojohn writes "Red Hat has announced their release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which includes integrated virtualization. Also of note, 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also available on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Red Hat Network management service, world-class technical support and over 3,400 certified applications, available to customers on Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters.'"

63 comments

  1. what, no slashvertisement tag? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    "This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Red Hat Network management service, world-class technical support and over 3,400 certified applications, available to customers on Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters."

    ha! Does it make kool-aid too?

    1. Re:what, no slashvertisement tag? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Does it make kool-aid too?

      No. And CentOS 5.1 won't either. Coming soon, I hope.

  2. But can it do.... by netglen · · Score: 0, Redundant

    "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 virtualization delivers considerably broader server support than proprietary virtualization products, and up to twice the performance."

    But can it support Leopard?

    1. Re:But can it do.... by DaveWick79 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Virtualization is not a new feature for RedHat Enterprise. Advanced Server 5.0 already supports unlimited guest OS's. According to RedHat's web site (for Enterprise 5.0), the only product they support running in virtualization is, you guessed it, RedHat Enterprise.
      According to the article, it sounds like the only thing they added for 5.1 is support for Windows guests.

    2. Re:But can it do.... by TheOrquithVagrant · · Score: 1

      What's happened with the virtualization is that they've upgraded the hypervisor from Xen 3.0.3 to Xen 3.1. This is a pretty major upgrade in capabilites and stability. Better support for HVM guests is just one of them.

  3. Cool by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    But does it run ...? Er. Never mind.

  4. yesterday's news today by asv108 · · Score: 4, Informative
    5.1 was announced yesterday, along with a swarm of press releases. Its funny how Redhat doesn't mention Xen anywhere, and you really have to dig to find out its just Xen. The Redhat press releases and marketing make it sound like they developed their own virtualization layer.

    Many of other distros have included Xen for quite some time.

    1. Re:yesterday's news today by SleeknStealthy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Who do you think primary developed Xen? Not to excuse the outside developers so yes they should have included the project name, but maybe Redhat should get some credit for the work.

      --
      Math
    2. Re:yesterday's news today by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Red Hat isn't interested in promoting Xen because they are trying to make their ultimate virtualization product agnostic to any specific virtualization engine. The power of their offering is in the libvert management tools that they are leading development on and in their Satellite offering for remote deployment.

    3. Re:yesterday's news today by ms1234 · · Score: 3, Funny

      And today Fedora 8 was released.

    4. Re:yesterday's news today by Znork · · Score: 5, Informative

      "The Redhat press releases and marketing make it sound like they developed their own virtualization layer."

      Essentially they've developed their own interaction layer around the virtualization layer. While Xen is the furthest along for the moment, RedHat, it seems, aims to be hypervisor agnostic as far as the management goes.

      "Many of other distros have included Xen for quite some time."

      Including Fedora and Redhat (and as far as stabilizing Xen3 enough to be usable on various mainstream kernels they've done an impressive job; having played around with Xen since FC4 I can recall the fun of building my own xen kernels from the xen mainline and getting them to play nice. It used to be significantly more painful back then.).

    5. Re:yesterday's news today by Sosarian · · Score: 2, Informative

      And the Xen guys want it that way. They don't want you using their trademark.

      Sounds odd to me, but that's their business.

    6. Re:yesterday's news today by Target+Practice · · Score: 1

      I agree with the slow news, but to clarify the Xen point:

      Redhat has also included Xen for quite some time, if you take that to mean since earlier this year. They've also been touting their virtualization abilities since RHEL 5.

      Novell also offers virtualization (through Xen), and you'll notice that they take the same stance as RedHat: Our virtualization is hot as snot, and nothing can compare.

      I'm glad everyone is making cool front ends to Xen. Point and drool folk need that. But please, make the companies put credit where it's due!

      --
      There's a 68.71% chance you're right.
    7. Re:yesterday's news today by stry_cat · · Score: 1

      You know Xen has a bunch of hype, but I can't help but notice when I use xen the only thing that appears in the process table is qemu. Makes one wonder if all this hype isn't just a newer version of qemu.

    8. Re:yesterday's news today by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ack! I always thought the same thing but figured that I was too uneducated to understand it all. But, I always wondered what Xen actually was because when I run it, it seems to be running Qemu.

      For the record, I have found both Xen and Qemu by itself to be rather on the slow side. Again, perhaps it is my "lack of education" but, I still prefer VMWare Server for its performance and ease of use. Cross platform too. Lickable!

    9. Re:yesterday's news today by Courageous · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Who do you think primary (sic) developed Xen?

      The people at Xen Source primarily developed Xen.

    10. Re:yesterday's news today by ekeko · · Score: 1

      I am not promoting this, just mentioning that Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 64-bit (which is based on RedHat Linux 5 I believe) comes with Xen kernels and software.
      I have tried it out running an instance of OEL 5 (64-bit) as a dom0, an Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (64-bit) as a domU, and an Oracle Enterprise Linux 4.4 (32-bit) as a domU.
      The domains startup well, and disk I/O performance seems to be close to native speed.
      More tests are required though. In particular testing NFS performance and installation Oracle's applications.

    11. Re:yesterday's news today by cralewyth · · Score: 1

      *scoff*

      Do you really believe that?

      --
      "Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
    12. Re:yesterday's news today by SmackedFly · · Score: 1

      It's old news that Xensource have put their lawyers on the task of defending their Xen brand. So really, redhat are actually forced to not mention the brand as part of their product, if they did, they'd probably have a lawsuit on their hands. Sure, it's Xen, but they can't call it Xen, atleast not in their product description, just like CentOS is RHEL, but you can't call it that...

    13. Re:yesterday's news today by Software · · Score: 1

      Who do you think primarily developed Xen?
      Maybe the people who sold Xen to Citrix? http://www.citrixxenserver.com/Pages/default.aspx Just guessing.
    14. Re:yesterday's news today by TheOrquithVagrant · · Score: 1

      The main, initial work on Xen was definitely done by the guys at XenSource. IBM, ,HP, Intel, Fujitsu, Novell, AMD & Redhat, among others, are also significant contributors, but RedHat is nowhere near the biggest one. Just doing a quick grep on the xen unstable changelogs, RedHat appears to be the one that have originated the least number of patches out of all the aforementioned contributing companies, although "number of patches" is not necessarily a significant measure of the value of someone's contribution to a codebase.

    15. Re:yesterday's news today by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Unfortunately, it's not hypervisor agnostic. It's centered around Xen and the use of RedHat Network, and the tools are quite poor. Whoever wrote these out-of-date versions of "virt-manager" and "virt-install" tool was too stupid to admit the use of multiple disks or partitions at boot time, to use kernels installed on the Dom0, to allow it to check for and re-use previous configuration files as templates, to avoid resource conflicts such as UUID or MAC address among the domains, to provide the same options for installation for both the text and the GUI tool, and RedHat's "anaconda" system installer is awful. Coupled with their refusal to provide a single installation DVD or installation image for network installations, RHEL 5 is an installation mess. Add on what RedHat did to staple the poor configuration management of "up2date" under the guise of the "yum-rhn-plugin", and you have an unmaintainable mess for development environments.

      If you need RHEL compatibility, use CentOS 4 and 5, which provide much better package management by actually using yum and are vastly easier to handle in Xen because of the lack of OS registration with a central authority or the need to manage proprietary "software channels" from an extremely poor, slow, and confusing interface at "RedHat Network". They also have an installation DVD that can be used to provide a network installation image: for RHEL, you have to manually assemble your own out of roughly half-a-dozen CD's in an undocumented operation.

    16. Re:yesterday's news today by jazzkat · · Score: 1
      Stry_Cat, I'm not sure how you're using Xen, but unless you're runing QEmu specifically, you shouldn't see QEmu in your process table on any of your domains. Xen-based machines or kernels are not user processes like QEmu machines are; in fact, Xen and QEmu are completely unrelated. On my CentOS-5 based home machine, the dom0 running a couple of domU children provides the following evidence that Xen is running:

      9 ? S< 0:00 [xenwatch]
      10 ? S< 0:00 [xenbus]
      1363 pts/0 S+ 0:00 grep -i xen
      2582 ? S 68:25 xenstored --pid-file /var/run/xenstore.pid
      2587 ? S 0:00 python /usr/sbin/xend start
      2589 ? Sl 0:00 xenconsoled
      2591 ? Sl 35:48 python /usr/sbin/xend start
      2958 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/xen/bin/xen-vncfb --unused --listen 127.0.0.1 --domid 1 --title webdev1
      2980 ? Sl 0:05 tapdisk /dev/xen/tapctrlwrite1 /dev/xen/tapctrlread1
      3134 ? Sl 0:00 /usr/lib/xen/bin/xen-vncfb --unused --listen 127.0.0.1 --domid 2 --title webdev2
      Cheers, JK
    17. Re:yesterday's news today by Courageous · · Score: 1

      Of course, yes. I believe that.

      C//

    18. Re:yesterday's news today by cralewyth · · Score: 1

      I fear the sarcasm was lost in transit. :'(

      --
      "Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
    19. Re:yesterday's news today by Courageous · · Score: 1

      The device that allows me to read your body language and facial expressions over the internet, to properly understand your dry humor, was malfunctioning.

      *blink*

      C//

    20. Re:yesterday's news today by cralewyth · · Score: 1

      Perhaps you could take it back for servicing some time soon?

      --
      "Women are just like ninjas; They lie even when it is more convenient to tell the truth." ~ Unknown
  5. Does anyone know... by JustNiz · · Score: -1, Redundant

    What VM engine are they actually using? Is it Xen, KVM, or did Red Hat do their own proprietary thing?

    1. Re:Does anyone know... by mysqlrocks · · Score: 1

      What VM engine are they actually using? Is it Xen, KVM, or did Red Hat do their own proprietary thing?

      My guess is that it's Xen. RHEL5 includes virtualization with Xen, so I'm pretty sure it's the same in 5.1.

      --
      Bradley Holt
    2. Re:Does anyone know... by baggins2001 · · Score: 3, Informative

      Currently their virtualization is based on Xen, but when I recently talked with a RH employee involved in this part, they hinted to a strong possibility of switching to KVM. Basically they said these commands can change, but if you learn how to do it with these commands then you won't have to worry as much about changes in the framework. The commands he was pushing me away from were Xen specific.
      Sorry I forget the reason for why they might change, but it had to do with compatibility and ease of use.
      At the time I was a little confused as to whether it was a good thing they were dynamic enough to change or a bad thing. But I think that they have worked with Xen a long time and there were be pretty good reasons to change from a customer/business point of view.

      --
      He who said 1,000,000 monkeys on 1,000,000 typewriters would eventually type the great novel, never saw an AOL chat room
    3. Re:Does anyone know... by vfrex · · Score: 1

      I thought Red Hat just wanted their VM management software to be hypervisor agnostic. If they abstract away from having anything specific to a particular one, they could better harness forks and updates as OSS is so good at.

    4. Re:Does anyone know... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sorry I forget the reason for why they might change, but it had to do with compatibility and ease of use.

      Something to do with having to maintain two different Linux kernels (the kernel and kernel-xen) and having a hypervisor underneath it all which essentially copies functionality from the Linux kernel. Ulrich Drepper explains it a bit better here. KVM is a simple kernel module and just makes a lot more sense.

  6. Live migration? by ceswiedler · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization includes the ability to perform live migration, allowing customers to seamlessly move running applications from one server to another...

    How good is the live migration support? Has anyone used it?

    Is this based on Xen or something else?

    1. Re:Live migration? by pembo13 · · Score: 1

      Based on Xen.

      --
      "Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
    2. Re:Live migration? by jsolan · · Score: 5, Informative

      We've upgraded all our 5 servers to 5.1 in the past 2 days, all of which are Xen dom0.
      The live migration of fully virtualized (hvm) guests is now supported and works swimmingly well. There is 0 downtime, only a small hiccup in the network connection, which is not noticeable unless you are watching for it. We've transferred mid-download on the domU and have not dropped a packet.
      The only issue we've really had is having to re-setup the NIC cards of HVM guests after the upgrade. They apparently see a different (better?) piece of hardware for the virutalized network card.
      Live migration of paravirtualized guests has always worked well and continues to do so.

      ACPI is now supported in windows guests, which is a big bonus for us.
      32-bit paravirtualized guest also work on 64-bit dom0's. This is only a "technology preview" but so far has worked pretty good (for the day and half we've had a system running on it). However live migration from a 64-bit host to a 32-bit host (and vice versa) does not appear to work. I've not delved into it enough to find the problem though.

    3. Re:Live migration? by Erik+Hensema · · Score: 1

      I'm using xen 3.0.x on opensuse 10.1 and opensuse 10.2 and live migration works great. However, you can't migrate virtualized disks, so the domU's need to be diskless. We're using iSCSI.

      --

      This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.

    4. Re:Live migration? by Tracy+Reed · · Score: 1

      Live migration rocks. I have used it many times in Xen 3.1 between AMD x86-64 machines.

    5. Re:Live migration? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Really? Even if the virtual disks are on shared storage, like a SAN?

  7. AWS by olddotter · · Score: 1

    Earlier this week at woek an Amazon rep present on the Amazon Web Services (AWS). I didn't expect much, but the presentation at least sounded pretty impressive. So the RH on Amazon compute servers is something I and others should check out.

    --
    Think Deeply. ...
  8. Kerberos 1.6 Support! Yeah! by Zombie+Ryushu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    What makes me happy: Kerberos 1.6 ewith LDAP Backend! Hell yeah! OpenAFS 1.4, Fuck yeah! No more maintaining two databases for Kerberos and one for everything else: Win and God.

    1. Re:Kerberos 1.6 Support! Yeah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      google PTSLdap for a nifty gem

    2. Re:Kerberos 1.6 Support! Yeah! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://clue.eng.iastate.edu/ptsldap/

    3. Re:Kerberos 1.6 Support! Yeah! by josephdrivein · · Score: 1

      Maybe my university will update its machines. I'm not sure if it's because they have some long term support with RH but Debian stable seems more up to date compared to my box...

  9. W00T fp.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    obvious t4at there

  10. One question: by corychristison · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When does the CentOS alternative come out? ;-)

    1. Re:One question: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Shouldn't be too long. I assume they script most of the logo replacement stuff.

    2. Re:One question: by Nibbler999 · · Score: 2, Informative

      They would be aiming get that out within 2 weeks.

  11. Re:One question: You beat me to it! by mlwmohawk · · Score: 1

    I was going to post, and CentOS comes out in 5...4...3...2...

  12. Virtualization bugs me.... by killmofasta · · Score: 1

    I finally figured out why 'virtualization' bugs me so much.
    Its TIMESHARING! Duh! ( Not timeslicing! )

    1. Re:Virtualization bugs me.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      So that place I go to at the beach for a week once a year is a virtual house?

    2. Re:Virtualization bugs me.... by Doug+Neal · · Score: 1

      So that place I go to at the beach for a week once a year is a virtual house? Yeah. Just wait til they implement live migration!
  13. coming tomorrow by reaktor · · Score: 3, Funny

    Tune in tomorrow on slashdot for that story.

  14. Virtualization... by gillbates · · Score: 1

    It's even kind of surreal, knowing that Red Hat 6.0 was released in 1999. I still have a copy of the original Red Hat 5.x release from 1998.

    I realize it's a different product and all, but it's kind of weird that this sounds like 1998 all over again.

    --
    The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
    1. Re:Virtualization... by styrotech · · Score: 1

      Yeah now that you mention it, Red Hat 5.1 was the first Linux distro (or *nix of any kind for that matter) I'd ever tried. It wasn't that long before I decided I preferred Debian Slink and OpenBSD 2.6 though :)

    2. Re:Virtualization... by synnthetic · · Score: 0

      You too? I bought RH 5.0 in a box in a store. Then after figuring out the NeoMagic X .rpm for my Thinkpad, 5.1 came out and included the support for it.

      Everytime I boot a new OS release, I'm just happy if I can see X windows!

  15. kvm should be looked into if you are considering by bl8n8r · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've had 4 windows 2000 servers running under kvm[0] (on centos 5.0 host). The performance seemed about the same as vmware, albeit I wasn't able to get dnsmasq and VDE[1] running correctly. Anyway, kvm is rolled into the centos 5 kernel and it does GUI where Xen does not. It's a bit ragged to setup, but looks promising.

    [0] - http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki
    [1] - http://wiki.virtualsquare.org/index.php/VDE

    --
    boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
  16. What worries me is Amazon by williamyf · · Score: 1

    Diversification. That is a very dangerous proposition, especialy for a company which, while highly valued, is not THAT profitable.

    They started with the books.
    then doing stores fr other merchants.
    Then a search engine.
    Now datacenters.

    Wish them well, but honest to god, I donot know how that may end well.

    --
    *** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
  17. How long by onlyjoking · · Score: 1

    .... before I can run RHEL, XP and Leopard virtualised on my PC? THAT'll be what I call "cloud" computing. That aside, now I can install Linux with XP virtualised for all my friends and clients, advising them to do all their internet work on Linux, keep the NIC disabled on XP and limit XP to games and proprietary software not available on Linux. Gradually ween them off Windows.

    1. Re:How long by Culture20 · · Score: 1

      Unlikely unless they're playing solitaire since the graphics hardware the Windows VM will see is not the real system hardware, and thus none of their apps will be accelerated.

  18. The cloud page is down. Too much load? ;-) by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
    Of all the things you DON'T want to buckle under load, the page linked to by your press release about how infinitely scalable you are when running on Amazon EC2 is probably up there at the top of the list. :-)

    It's currently reading:

    redhat.com
    is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later.
  19. Re:kvm should be looked into if you are considerin by TheOrquithVagrant · · Score: 1

    "and it does GUI where Xen does not"

    What do you mean by this? The graphics support in Xen and KVM is pretty much the same, given that they both use qemu for VGA emulation. If you're talking admin-Gui on CentOS, it's virt-manager for both.

  20. The KVM or not? by rainhill · · Score: 1

    With the release of Redhat 5 back in spring, someone at Redhat mentioned that they were working on KVM, does anyone know if Redhat is planning to drop Xen in favor of KVM with next release?

  21. Re:kvm should be looked into if you are considerin by bl8n8r · · Score: 1

    > What do you mean by this? I had read that Xen was not able to support GUI environments and could only be used with textmode/console based OS flavors. Perhaps I've misunderstood.

    --
    boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org