Red Hat Delivers Enterprise Linux 5 At Long Last

March 19, 2007 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Last Wednesday, commercial Linux distributor Red Hat announced its virtualized and improved Enterprise Linux 5 operating system. The main benefit of RHEL 5 is integrated support for the open source Xen server virtualization hypervisor from XenSource, as well as a new Linux kernel and integrated global file systems and high availability clustering software.

Like RHEL 3 and RHEL 4 before it, RHEL 5 is, of course, supported on IBM‘s Power-based servers–that’s iSeries and System i machines and pSeries and System p boxes–as well as its mainframes, the product is sold mostly on X64 machines at this point and a smattering of Itanium-based servers. RHEL 5 comes in two basic flavors: a base server that can run on a machine with up to two processor sockets and which supports up to four Xen virtual machines and an Advanced Platform version that is supported on larger machines and which ahs unlimited virtual machine partitioning. The Advanced Platform includes Red Hat’s Cluster Suite and Global File System, where as the RHEL 5 base server does not include it. These features are probably not very useful on System i5 and p5 machines, and Xen is certainly not supported on Power servers (at least not yet). Pricing for RHEL 5 is exactly the same as for RHEL 4.

We do, of course, cover Red Hat’s and other companies’ Linux announcements in full in The Linux Beacon. But if you can’t wait until Tuesday to see the RHEL 5 coverage, you can read all about it on our Breaking News section. See Red Hat Integrates and Simplifies with RHEL 5 and The Feeds and Speeds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for more.

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