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Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Release: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1

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Red Hat has announced the general, worldwide availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1, the first update to the platform since the delivery of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 in November 2010.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 enhancements provide customers with improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, coupled with support for upcoming system hardware. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 also delivers patches and security updates, while maintaining application compatibility and OEM/ISV certifications.

In addition to performance improvements, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 also provides numerous technology updates, including:

– Additional configuration options for advanced storage configurations with improvements in FCoE, Datacenter Bridging and iSCSI offload, which allow networked storage to deliver the quality of service commonly associated with directly connected storage

– Enhancements in virtualization, file systems, scheduler, resource management and high availability

– New technologies that enable smoother enterprise deployments and tighter integration with heterogeneous systems

– A technology preview of Red Hat Enterprise Identity (IPA) services, based on the open source FreeIPA project

– Support for automatic failover for virtual machines and applications using the Red Hat High Availability Add-On

– Integrated developer tools that provide the ability to write, debug, profile and deploy applications without leaving the graphical environment

– Improvements to network traffic processing to leverage multi-processor servers that are getting increasingly common

Scalent Brings Combined Virtual and Bare Metal Management for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

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Scalent Systems, provider of real-time Management & Automation software for large data centers, and Red Hat today announced Scalent’s support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Xen. The combined solution extends virtualization and data center automation beyond hypervisors, to bare metal servers, network and storage connectivity.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 provides IT managers unprecedented levels of operational flexibility, via a comprehensive suite of open source server applications and virtualization capabilities . Scalent V/OE enables IT managers to rapidly provision entire virtual or bare metal servers and associated storage and network topologies, yielding higher asset utilization and dramatically lower costs.

Scalent’s software provides real time data center management, automation, and virtualization across physical and virtual servers, networks, and storage. Highly complementary to Red Hat’s Linux Automation efforts, the Scalent V/OE software enables data centers to react in real-time to changing business needs by shifting workloads and connectivity.

The result: data centers can transition between different configurations – or from bare metal to live, connected servers – in five minutes or less, without physical intervention.

Scalent’s software complements Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Linux Automation capabilities by delivering fully transparent management & automation of software workloads and connectivity across bare metal and virtual environments, including:

  • Simple, transparent deployment, automation, and management of both virtual and physical servers, network connectivity and storage access
  • Cost-effective high availability and server failover solutions, through Scalent’s N+1 technology leveraging existing IT assets
  • Fully-automated disaster recovery across data centers, through Scalent’s disaster recovery technology;
  • Creation of server pools that enable server rightsizing and scalability through dynamic repurposing; and
  • Effective chargeback capabilities, logical, secure partitioning, and named pools of resources for rapid change of operational lab or production environments.

FastScale Ships New Release of Composer Suite, Adds Windows and RHEL 5.2 Support

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FastScale Technology today announced (PDF) the newest release of its flagship product, FastScale Composer Suite, which it claims to be the only technology on the market today to fully automate the process of building, managing and deploying server software environments for enterprise class data centers and Web farms, whether the infrastructure is physical, virtual or both. The new release adds support for Windows Server 2003 environments, new capabilities in lightweight application provisioning, and delivers a range of scalability and usability enhancements.

The new features in detail:

  • New platform support – including deployment of Windows Server 2003 and RHEL 5.2 environments.
  • Lightweight application provisioning – for just-in-time, virtualized deployment of modular, enterprise class applications, enabling increased infrastructure performance and stateless server configurations.
  • Increased scalability & usability – with streamlined configuration settings, enhanced Web and command line interfaces, and easier navigation for large enterprise deployments.

FastScale Composer Suite with support for Windows is available now. Pricing starts at $30,000.

Red Hat Unveils Virtualization Strategy At Boston Summit

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Today at Red Hat Summit in Boston, two of Red Hat’s emerging technology engineers, Dan Barrange and Richard Jones, presented the new tool sets that their team has developed for work with Xen virtual machines (VMs). It includes command line utilities, which will become part of the oVirt tool set, a web-based virtual machine management console built using Ruby on Rails.

oVirt uses Red Hat’s open source libvirt management framework that provides hypervisor-agnostic management interfacing, allowing the same tools to manage multiple different hypervisors. Libvirt already supports six hypervisors : Xen, KVM, QEMU, OpenVZ, Linux Containers (LVX) and Solaris LDoms.

The company also announced that its own embedded, lightweight, stand-alone hypervisor and accompanying management console are available in beta right now. Red Hat’s new Linux hypervisor hosts both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Rather than base the software on the open-source Xen hypervisor, Red Hat has chosen the KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) project, which is already used by the major Linux OSs as the default server virtualization package. Another key difference: while Xen works well with Linux, it’s an add-on. KVM, on the other hand, is an integral part of Linux.

Read more about Red Hat’s virtualization announcements here.

Novell And Red Hat Upgrade Linux Enterprise Distros, Improve Virtualization Support

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Novell and Red Hat announced upgrades of their Linux-based enterprise distros, featuring improved virtualization and hardware support. In addition, Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 SP2 adds a new subscription management tool, while Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.2 adds new security, clustering, desktop, and networking features.

Virtualization is the big story here. Red Hat has upgraded RHEL’s core virtualization hypervisor, Xen, to version 3.1.2, and has improved its support for NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architectures.

RHEL now supports virtualization of very large systems, says Red Hat, including systems with up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory. New CPU frequency scaling support is said to reduce power consumption for virtualized processes. RHEL also gains new clustering capabilities, including improved application failover support, which when combined with the virtualization enhancements, should lead to greater server farm stability.

Virtualization also seems to lead the way with Novell SLES 10 Service Pack 2 enhancements, which support Xen 3.2 (compared to RHEL 5.2’s Xen 3.1.2 support). Novell claims that with Xen 3.2, the new SLES is “the only Xen-based virtualization solution with full support from Microsoft for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 guests, and live migration of those guests across physical machines.” Novell and Microsoft went in on an interoperability lab last fall.

Meanwhile, the company has been dropping hints about SLES 11, which is due in the first half of 2009. Novell hopes to make SLES 11 available as an appliance that will be supported by a new toolset designed to quickly build specialized images. Novell is planning versions optimized for specific ISV stacks, as well as a new embedded version to allow independent hardware vendors to embed virtualization and operating systems directly into the hardware. Other touted SLES 11 enhancements relate to “mission-critical data center technologies, Unix migration, virtualization, interoperability, green computing, and desktop Linux,” says Novell.

Both distros are available from today, according to both companies.

[Source: Linux Watch]