Slashdot Mirror
Red Hat Releases RHEL 5.1, Includes Virtualization
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.'"
"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.).
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.