Red Hat Releases RHEL 6

alphadogg writes "Red Hat on Wednesday released version 6 of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) distribution. 'RHEL 6 is the culmination of 10 years of learning and partnering,' said Paul Cormier, Red Hat's president of products and technologies, in a webcast announcing the launch. Cormier positioned the OS both as a foundation for cloud deployments and a potential replacement for Windows Server. 'We want to drive Linux deeper into every single IT organization. It is a great product to erode the Microsoft Server ecosystem,' he said. Overall, RHEL 6 has more than 2,000 packages, and an 85 percent increase in the amount of code from the previous version, said Jim Totton, vice president of Red Hat's platform business unit. The company has added 1,800 features to the OS and resolved more than 14,000 bug issues."

Comments

erode Windows server how?

[cschepers]

At my workplace, Red Hat server licensing is pricier than Windows Server licensing. I'd love to move servers off Windows, but it'll be hard to justify if it costs more.

Re:erode Windows server how?

[xiando]

Fedora is a really bad choice for enterprise environments. Fedora provides updates for 13 months. RHEL has a 7 year lifecycle. Enough said.

Re:erode Windows server how?

[DrgnDancer]

On a per server basis, maybe, but once you pay for a year of Red Hat support you're done. No per seat licenses. It's like $200 (more now? I don't know.. I don't actually handle the money part) to "license" a server for a year (really for a year's worth of support). That's it. Got 2 users? $200. Got 2000 users? $200. The support is good too. Got a problem? Open a ticket. They'll pretty much solve it for you, no per incident charges.

Re:erode Windows server how?

[h4rr4r]

Windows Server Licenses do not include support. There is your price difference.

Re:erode Windows server how?

[h4rr4r]

Redhat would never make a dime.
Truth is lots of places use Centos as it is now.

RHEL should offer site licenses or something like that. No need to be cheaper just even more easy to deal with. The lack of CALs and different levels of the OS already makes them easier to deal with than windows licensing.

Re:erode Windows server how?

[sdguero]

And, as a poster above mentioned, there aren't client limitations like with windows server.

Re:erode Windows server how?

[h4rr4r]

Touche, but windows licensing really does get people into trouble. I have seen many small shops who had no CALs and in some cases no Sharepoint CALs. They were upset when they found out you had to buy the software and then the right to use it separately. I really think Microsoft does this on purpose, since violations can turn into real money very quickly.

Re:erode Windows server how?

[h4rr4r]

https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata/

RHEL support is good for 10 years these days.

RHEL comes with free CALs

[tepples]

Red Hat server licensing is pricier than Windows Server licensing.

At first, I guessed that it might have something to do with the common conception that one can run more things on a single Red Hat server than on a single Windows server. But a couple Google searches later, I found this Microsoft white paper claiming that Red Hat doesn't charge for client access licenses for RHEL.

Re:RHEL comes with free CALs

[seifried]

Or you can just install CentOS which is Red Hat minus the artwork and the word "Red Hat" like most of us. I find Linux generally stable/reliable enough that I don't need support (I can't even remember my last Linux server crash, it's been years and stuff "just works").

Re:RHEL comes with free CALs

[cduffy]

That's fine and dandy if it's just your own server hooked up to your cable, but when it matters, going without support isn't a realistic option no matter how good the software is.

It's also fine and dandy if you have an in-house systems engineering team who can hack anything from the kernel through the app layer.

I've been part of that team at multiple shops. It's a pretty fun role -- lots of variety (everything from patching buggy DSDTs in the firmware of the servers we were using to extending the virtualization libraries with features we needed and pushing those upstream... and everything inbetween).

Not everyone needs a support contract, even if they're doing Serious Business. Indeed, if you're running tens of thousands of relatively cheap servers, those support contracts can be pretty expensive. (Not nearly as expensive as power and cooling, to be sure, but not entirely trivial either).

Re:Only 2000 packages

[kwalker]

If you install EPEL you'll get an additional 4600+ packages.

However RHEL/CentOS are server operating systems, so a lot of packages that make sense on desktops are omitted.

Still the gold standard of long-supported releases

[proxima]

RHEL provides a 7 year lifecycle, which is unmatched by the other major distributions I know about (even Debian). This is crucial for the enterprise; I know of a number of systems which are still running RHEL3 after 6-7 years. Upgrading production computers is not a trivial process, and 2-3 year lifecycles just don't cut it in some situations.

Re:85% increase in code?

[h4rr4r]

1. You don't have to install all that crap.
2. RHEL includes support, so they still are cheaper.

Re:CentOS

[rayvd]

Usually takes 6 weeks or so. You can follow the CentOS twitter feed here to keep up.

In addition, sounds like there may be new ways shortly for tracking CentOS development.

Official RHEL blog post

[trawg]

No official link given in the OP, but here's the Red Hat blog post, titled "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6: A Technical Look at Red Hat’s Defining New Operating Platform", which gives a good look at some of the changes.

The less-interesting press releases are here (Red Hat Enables Expanded Deployment Flexibility and Application Portability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6) and here (Red Hat Sets a New Standard for the Next Generation of Operating Systems).

Re:Moron quasi journalists

[codepunk]

16 or 128TB of ram, I would call those java ready platforms.

Re:directory Server ?

[buchanmilne]

Does this include the directory server that mac's and windows machines can work with ?

Windows machines have poor support for "directory servers" compared to most other OSs. If you mean an Active Directory replacement, no, because Windows machines expect that Active Directory has LDAP, Kerberos, CIFS, DNS and a few other services *all* running on the "directory server" (where other OSs allow these to be separated and/or scaled differently). If you need AD support with GPOs etc., you can consider trying samba4, but it's still in alpha (although some sites are running it in production). If you just need to authenticate Windows desktops, and don't need GPO-only features (but user/group policies are sufficient, if crufty), samba-3.5 as provided in RHEL6 may be sufficient.

The OpenLDAP included with RHEL6 is good enough for all other operating systems with support for "directory servers", including Linux, Mac OS X, BSD, Solaris, AIX etc.

Of course, RH would prefer to sell you RHDS subscriptions ...