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RHEL

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

RHEL 5.4 will feature KVM

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July 1st marked the availability of the first Beta version of what will eventually become Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 (RHEL) , for Virtualization.com readers the most important part of this upcoming release is with no doubt the full shift from Xen to KVM. When late last year RedHat picked up Qumranet it was clear that they weren’t going to gamble on 2 horses (Xen and KVM) and that for RedHat KVM was their platform of choice

Where initially KVM was considered for a lot of people as the Desktop Virtualization platform of the future , RedHat is now placing it in the center of their Enterprise Linux distribution.

But they aren’t ready yet .. when RedHat travels around the globe demoing it’s Virtualization platform it got from Qumranet is often critized for not having fully opened the code yet and and that their management platform still requires people to use a windows only management interface (much like Xensource had with one 3.X release) But with RedHat’s promise to open source Qumranet’s code that is probably only a matter of time.

The bigger question however is that of the migration from Xen to KVM. Different people have already build their toolchain, methods and procedures around working with Xen, some of them have based it on LibVirt, others on the Xen tools themselves, they are really happy about the Xen framework but they are really happy about a RHEL based platform also. Given it’s long term commitments RedHat has to provide Xen for a long time to come.

CentOS and Unbreakable, being Rebuilds of RHEL will have automatically KVM support included , but Oracle already showed the world it is aiming it’s arrows at Xen.

So how does the RedHat userbase feel about this .. are they going to follow RedHat to KVM or are they going to stay with their trusted and familiar Xen platform ?

Red Hat announced Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

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Today RedHat sent out 2 press releases obviously in an attempt to get Virtual visibility during VMWorld. Europe, The biggest news in those 2 press releases is the announcement of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor, or the RHEV . Red Hat announced their new strategy regarding to Virtualization which they call the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio of products.

First in the Lineup is

Red Hat Enterprise Linux: Red Hat’s strategic direction for the future development of its virtualization product portfolio is based on KVM, making Red Hat the only virtualization vendor leveraging technology that is developed as part of the Linux operating system. Existing Xen-based deployments will continue to be supported for the full lifetime of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and Red Hat will provide a variety of tools and services to enable customers to migrate from their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Xen deployment to KVM.

Well, we already knew that, given the fact that Fedora is heading KVM-wards and that they have to support Xen in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for the full life cycle of RHEL 5, therefore at least till 2014
KVM will enter the RHEL product line as part of RHEL 5.4, due to be released later this year
RedHat is also announcing Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers

A new, richly featured virtualization management solution for servers that will be the first open source product in the industry to allow fully integrated management across virtual servers and virtual desktops, featuring Live Migration, High Availability, System Scheduler, Power Manager, Image manager, Snapshots, thin provisioning, monitoring and reporting. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers will be able to manage both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 hosts, as well as the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

a framework based on LibVirt and Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops ,

A new management system for virtual desktops that will deliver industry-leading VDI cost-performance for both Linux and Windows desktops, based on Qumranet’s SolidICE and using SPICE remote rendering technology.

With confirmation that the Qumranet code will be open sourced just as RedHat has done with all their other products so far.

And last but not least RedHat is launching a new standalone hypervisor : Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor

Which is

KVM unbundled from RHEL, in a package dubbed RHEV-H(ypervisor). RHEV-H is a stateless hypervisor, with a tight footprint of under 128MB, which presents a libvirt interface to the management tier. Enterprise servers will no longer need to go through an installation process, and will instead be able to boot RHEV-H from flash or a network server, and be able to immediately begin servicing virtual guests. This stateless model drives down OPEX and enables the scalability required by terascale grids, large datacenters and cloud class compute environments.

RedHat also announced that its broad ecosystem of applications tested and certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux are certified to run in a Red Hat virtualized platform with no modifications.

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.

The Xen of Oracle, or was it the Oracle of Xen ?

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The Xen Blog has the news that Oracle joined the Xen Advisory Board.

“Having Oracle join the Xen Advisory Board is a significant milestone for the Xen.org community and Xen hypervisor,” said Ian Pratt, founder of the xen project and Chairman of Xen.org. “With Oracle’s industry leadership and enterprise market experience, the Xen.org community is further strengthened, ensuring a continued leadership position as the open source hypervisor of choice.”

“As a leading contributor to the Open Source community, Oracle is pleased to join the Xen Advisory Board,” said Wim Coekaerts, vice president Linux Engineering, Oracle. “With development projects such as enhancing Oracle Cluster File System 2 with features useful for virtualization, memory management changes with the hcache and hswap projects and integrating the Linux data integrity project into Xen, Oracle continues to focus on enhancing Xen with enterprise-class features.”

Together with Wim “Seklos” Coekaerts , comes Dan “I’ll replace you with a small shell script” Magenheimer, formerly of HP and the leader of the Itanium Xen port as an Oracle Observer, and Kurt Hackel, who leads the Oracle VM dev team.

Throughout 2008, Oracle has already significantly increased its contribution to the Xen.org community, including a focus on the new Xen debugger, a new implementation effort on the Xen API, timer testing, new memory caching algorithms, and updates to support Oracle software running on the Xen hypervisor. These contributions from Oracle are valuable to the Xen customer base as they provide enhancements to the Xen hypervisor’s capabilities in the enterprise and cloud computing space. These features are also important to the development community as the new Xen debugger delivers greater insight into the hypervisor’s state during development testing, allowing for faster bug identification and fixes.

Simon Crosby comments on Oracle earlier involvement “Whereas Oracle Unbreakable Linux is a derivative of Unfakable Enterprise Linux” (in other words, RHEL) the Xen in Oracle VM comes directly from the upstream Xen.org code base, and not via an intermediate distro. This means that Oracle VM tracks the xen.org upstream code base more closely than OEL can track kernel.org. Oracle has already offered a valuable set of set of patches and contributions to the project, and will host the next Xen Developer Summit.”

Simon also isn’t that keen on the way Oracle has been supporting applications within VM’s in the past but hopes that with Oracle joining the Xen Project Advisory board they will learn about the business of partnering from the community and the ISV ecosystem.

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.