How's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Doing?

Published: June 10, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the great things about the double-barrel open source software and fee-based subscription support strategy that commercial Linuxes have is that there is very little economic pressure on Linux shops to upgrade from one version of the platform to another as their Linux vendor (or vendors) tweak, change, upgrade, and improve their distros. They get to move when they feel like it, and vendors who want to keep their customers agree to support their older releases for a long, long time.

This runs a bit contrary to the traditional Unix and proprietary server space, where customers are always under pressure to move to the latest hardware, which often requires the new software to make use of the new hardware features. Because Linux distributors don't have a hardware business to protect, and more importantly, because they are trying to get their Linux ported to as many different hardware architectures as they can afford, Linux turns the whole server-operating system racket a bit on its head. Which is refreshing, isn't it?

Having said all that, there are plenty of enticements in terms of packaging and features to upgrade through major and minor releases. With Enterprise Linux 5.2, which was put into the field two weeks ago, Red Hat expanded the operating system to support larger SMP and NUMA clusters, larger main memories, various power conservation features in today's processors, a new Xen hypervisor (which itself supports larger hardware chunks in a virtual machine with the latest update), and more processors--the latest Cell chips from IBM, the quad-core Opterons from Advanced Micro Devices, and the future octocore "Nehalem" Xeons from Intel, to be specific. These features will be enough to get some RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 shops to move their licenses ahead to RHEL 5 as they upgrade servers that are three, four, or even five years old to get more processing oomph and better performance per watt.

RHEL 5.0 shipped in March 2007, and according to Daniel Riek, product marketing manager for Enterprise Linux at Red Hat, about a third of the company's Linux customers have moved up to one of the RHEL 5 releases. (RHEL 5.1 shipped last fall and RHEL 5.2 came out on May 21.) "This is a pretty good ramp for the first year or so of shipments," brags Riek. Red Hat has no way of knowing what guests are running on those RHEL 5 instances, and it can be a mix of older RHEL releases as well as SUSE Linux or Windows, since all RHEL 5 releases have an integrated Xen hypervisor for supporting guest operating systems within RHEL 5.

Riek says that there are almost no customers using the old RHEL 2.1 Advanced Server release, which first shipped in March 2002 with the Linux 2.2 kernel and which was arguably the first enterprise-grade Linux from any commercial distro. (It had many Linux 2.4 features backported into it.) Red Hat is getting ready to announce the end of life for support for RHEL 2.1 AS and ES, which runs out on March 31, 2009.

RHEL 3, which came out in October 2003, was the first distribution to use the Linux 2.4 kernel, and the use of RHEL 3 is on the wane, too, says Riek. RHEL 4, which is based on the Linux 2.6 kernel and which was announced in February 2005, is the "main workhorse" in the Red Hat installed base, Riek explains, adding that "this is to be expected."

While Red Hat doesn't track the server platforms on which its software is installed, the company knows that the X64 platform, by which we mean 64-bit Xeon and Opteron processors from Intel and AMD, is by far the most popular hardware platform on which RHEL 5 is deployed; Riek adds that customers are choosing the 64-bit kernel to squeeze every ounce of performance out of their boxes. For RHEL 4, Riek says that most people were using 32-bit kernels, even if they were running the Linux on 64-bit iron. (This is perfectly possible, because the X64 architectures from Intel and AMD have backwards compatibility.) Looking ahead, Red Hat will of course allow 32-bit applications to run atop RHEL or the Xen hypervisor--and will do so for a very, very long time. But new features for the operating system will themselves be coded in 64-bits, and while the next version of its Linux, RHEL 6, will have a 32-bit kernel option, after that, Red Hat is not making any promises.

As I reported two weeks ago, Red Hat expects to get an updated to RHEL 4--the 4.7 release, to be precise--out the door on July 21, which will include updates for hardware, bug fixes, and security patches. Red Hat hopes to have RHEL 5.3 ready in January 2009 or so. While in the past, there was usually a fall release for RHEL, moving it to early 2009 allows Red Hat to get its Fedora development Linux more in phase with RHEL in terms of release cycles.

RELATED STORIES

Red Hat Continues Feature Expansion with RHEL 5.2

Red Hat Previews Fedora 9 Development Linux

Red Hat Releases Enterprise Linux 5.2 Beta

Red Hat to Use Automation, Virtualization to Eat the Server Space

The Low-Down on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 Enhancements

Red Hat, IBM Commit to Better Mainframe Linux

RHEL 5: How's It Going?

Red Hat Integrates and Simplifies with RHEL 5

                     Post this story to del.icio.us
               Post this story to Digg
    Post this story to Slashdot