Red Hat has released the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 beta with versions for IBM POWER, System z, as well as x86, x86/64, and Itanium. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 beta release includes new features and capabilities, combined with enhancements in virtualization, storage/filesystem, security and developer tools. The release is expected to be generally available before the end of the year, notes Subhendu Ghosh, Red Hat Enterprise Linux product manager.
A key capability in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 beta is the incorporation of KVM-based virtualization.
In Enterprise Linux 5, Red Hat had added virtualization as part of the base platform solution and in 5.4 the company has added an alternative hypervisor capability called KVM (kernel-based virtual machine. "That hypervisor technology leverages a lot of the hardware platform-enablement that our partners are putting in," Ghosh explains. According to the company, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 provides the first commercial-strength implementation of KVM, which is developed as part of the upstream Linux kernel. Xen-based virtualization remains fully supported for the life of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family.
In addition to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 beta which was just released, Red Hat recently announced the availability of the beta release of the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio, which includes Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Servers, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager for Desktops and the standalone, KVM-based Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Hypervisor.
An important feature of any Red Hat Enterprise Linux update is that kernel and user APIs are unchanged, so that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 applications do not need to be rebuilt or re-certified. This situation extends to virtualized environments: with a fully integrated hypervisor, the application binary interface (ABI) consistency offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux means that applications certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on physical machines are also certified when run in virtual machines. So the portfolio of thousands of certified applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux applies to both environments.
"We guarantee that anything that has been written on the RHEL 5 series from 5.0 will still work even though we are adding these new capabilities. The goal for us is to introduce new features for customers to enable new hardware capabilities, new feature sets, while at the same time maintaining the stability of the ISV ecosystem and that is something that we continue to do with all the point releases," notes Ghosh. All subscribing Red Hat customers can download the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 beta via Red Hat Network. For more information, go here.