Red Hat Readies RHEL 5 for March 14 Launch

Published: March 6, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat would have liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March 14. The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms.

At the end of 2006, when Red Hat's top brass was discussing its fiscal third quarter results, Matthew Szulik, Red Hat's chairman and chief executive officer, said that RHEL 5 would ship by February 28. And to be fair, Red Hat would have probably have liked to have been timed to market with SUSE 10's launch in late July last year. But the integration of the open source Xen hypervisor from XenSource as well as a number of other features took more time than expected, and therefore RHEL 5 was pushed to the end of 2006 and, late last year, was pushed out into early 2007.

The first beta of RHEL 5 came out on September 8 last year, followed by Beta 2 on November 2 and Release Candidate 1 sometime in late January. (My reviewer's copy of RHEL 5 RC1 came in last Friday, but I cannot verify when it shipped to customers.) There was never a plan for an RC2 or an RC3, since the code in RHEL 5 has been widely tested through the Fedora Linux development project and its Fedora Core 5 and Core 6 releases and through the RHEL beta program itself.

RHEL 5 has been cooking for more than two years and includes changes to the Linux kernel from version 2.6.9 to 2.6.18. In addition to the support for the Xen hypervisor, RHEL 5 also has an integrated version of Red Hat Cluster Suite, the company's high availability clustering software, as well as support for iSCSI disk arrays, InfiniBand with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and the SystemTap kernel probing tool. The latter is a joint development project that includes coders from Red Hat, IBM, Intel, and Hitachi. RHEL 5 will also include the Frysk system monitoring tool, support for quad-core X64 processors, and lots of other features. And of course, the stack of thousands of open source programs that are distributed with RHEL are also updated and their dependencies all worked out.

The forthcoming Red Hat announcement will likely include not just RHEL 5, but other updated software products and related services. And, perhaps most significantly, Red Hat will be divulging how it will price its products in an increasingly virtualized server and workstation world. It will be interesting to see what twist Red Hat brings to this mind bender.

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