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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.'"

16 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. 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 Courageous · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Who do you think primary (sic) developed Xen?

      The people at Xen Source primarily developed Xen.

  2. 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 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. 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.

  4. 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
  5. 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.

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

    When does the CentOS alternative come out? ;-)

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

      They would be aiming get that out within 2 weeks.

  7. coming tomorrow by reaktor · · Score: 3, Funny

    Tune in tomorrow on slashdot for that story.

  8. 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

    --
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