Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3b adds to virtualization
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 (RHEL 5.3) beta has been launched by Red Hat Inc. with claims that the companies adopting this shall be able to virtualise out-sized and complex operations with appealing ease. For beginners, RHEL 5.3 beta offers virtualization to run on larger systems with additional memory and with more guests per host. There have been significant improvements in this release, enabling enhancements in features such as clustering, file systems, hardware driver support and virtualization. It will also facilitate the intricate applications to link with disk storage and network support devices.
According to Daniel Riek, an RHEL product manager,
the number of processors in RHEL 5.3 beta nearly doubled from 64 to 126 and memory per host has nearly quadrupled from 256 GB to a 1 TB.
Not to forget these add-ons:
- The virtualization performance has been made superior by leaps and bounds by optimizing the RHEL OS and this thus helping in translation of physical addresses from guest to host in the hardware.
- The improvised integration of para-virtualized drivers which again help in speeding up of disk and network traffic to a great extent.
- The Global File System (GFS 2), an upgraded cluster file has also been added.
- Improvements have also been made for file system check capability, larger file handling, faster data recovery and easier user access.
- This new version also has the provision to connect to four different servers at the same time from just one guest server.
These additional benefits further increases the confidence in the virtualization capabilities of RHEL 5.3b. Though it’s the beta release and the final release is scheduled ahead in time. It is also significant because of its unique ability to optimize performance by harmonizing latest hardware to improvise performance.
This release of 5.3 beta version will be very important considering the product life cycle of Linux presently. Minor changes such as tracking of internal operations with the same applications will now become possible as compared to the previous version where in the kernel was the only place for these internal operations. Also, the provision of a guest run on the KVM hypervisor would help in testing for the software developers.
Overall RHEL 5.3 promises to be a good product.