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Release: RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.3

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RedHat just announced the release of RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.3 which is available for immediate download from Red Hat Network. According to the company, with this update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, customers will receive a wide range of enhancements, including significantly increased virtualization scalability.

RedHat lists Increased scalability of virtualized x86-64 environments as it’s prominent new feature:

“This includes the industry-leading ability to support virtual servers with up to 32 virtual CPUs and 80GB of memory. Physical server limits have also been expanded to match the size of today’s latest hardware systems, with up to 126 CPUs and 1TB main memory. New features, such as support for Hugepage memory and Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT), dramatically improve the performance of virtual servers. For customers, these enhancements allow more and larger virtual systems to be configured on today’s powerful servers, thereby reducing costs. Additionally, more devices can be allocated to each virtual server (guest), enabling the virtualization of applications with heavy I/O requirements. ”

Amongst other improvements is support for the Quad Core Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) processors and the inclusion of OpenJDK

More info including a Video on their blog.

Industry Moves: Former Red Hat COO Tim Buckley Joins rPath Board As Executive Chairman

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rPath today announced that Tim Buckley, principal of Buckley Investments and former chief operating officer of Red Hat, has joined the rPath board of directors as the executive chairman. From his newly created post, Buckley will help rPath accelerate its push into the enterprise market with solutions for reducing the cost and complexity of delivering applications to traditional, virtualized, and cloud-based environments.

Buckley brings more than 20 years of experience in sales and marketing leadership for high-growth technology start-ups. Prior to founding Buckley Investments LLC, a Raleigh, NC-based consulting company, he was COO for Red Hat, where he was part of the executive team that transformed the company from a start-up to the dominant provider of open source operating systems to the enterprise market. Red Hat has publicly credited Buckley with its worldwide growth and transformation into an enterprise sales organization.

Prior to Red Hat, Buckley was senior vice president of worldwide sales for Seattle-based Visio Corp., where he was instrumental in growing the company from start-up to IPO and ultimately through a $1.5 billion acquisition by Microsoft. Earlier, Buckley was an executive with Aldus, the developers of PageMaker; and Approach, which he helped launch from its early stages through a major acquisition by Lotus Development Corp

Virtuize Partners With RedHat

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Virtuize, Inc announced yesterday that it has partnered with Redhat, Inc to deliver Redhat’s Virtualization services to its customers. This expands Virtuize, Inc’s Open Source Virtualization portfolio.

Virtuize was formed in 2008 by industry specialists with over 25 years of consolidated experience to specialize in Virtualization and Cloud Computing Solutions.

More information about RedHat’s Virtualization Portofolio is on their site : www.redhat.com

Release: Fedora 10, Including Virtualization Improvements

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The Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, today announced the availability of Fedora 10, the latest version of its free open source operating system distribution. Fedora 10 features numerous technologies and continues to lay the groundwork for derivative open source distributions throughout the enterprise.

Since its inception, Fedora has adopted a leadership role in the development of open source software and continuously demonstrates its potential across the enterprise. This community of users and developers have blazed the trail in key feature development and actively forms the roadmap for open source technologies found in many platforms, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Fedora 10, the tenth release in five years, features substantial virtualization improvements for remote installation and management of storage provisioning. These features will make system administration of virtual machine hosts and guests easier and more capable of automation, especially as they are integrated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Additionally, Fedora 10 includes NetworkManager connection sharing, allowing laptop users with an Ethernet or mobile broadband connection to provide Internet routing to others through the laptop wireless interface, for instant collaboration anywhere, anytime.

AMD / Red Hat Pull Off A Live Migration of VMs Across Vendor Platforms

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AMD, in collaboration with Red Hat, today demonstrated for the first time “live migration” of a virtual machine across vendor platforms. Live migration enables the movement of running virtual machines (VMs) from one physical server to another without disrupting service to the end user, something that, till now, has only been demonstrated across systems based on one vendor’s platforms. Today’s live migration demonstration moves a live VM from an dual socket Intel Xeon DP Quad Core E5420-based system to a system based on the forthcoming 45nm Quad-Core AMD Opteron processor, utilizing Red Hat’s high-performance open source virtualization software. See the demonstration on the AMD Unprocessed YouTube Channel or here.

Update: also, read the blog post from Margaret Lewis (Product Marketing Director at AMD) on the announcement.

Industry interest in live migration has grown as virtualization technology has become more widely adopted. Live Migration of VMs across physical servers is a vital component of data center management that enables IT managers to move VMs as necessary in order to perform tasks such as upgrading or conducting maintenance of a server, balancing the server load and proactively managing the server availability to avoid downtime or lost data. The demonstration illustrates AMD’s approach to an open and collaborative relationship with its partners to meet customer demands.

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.