Red Hat released its second beta of Enterprise Linux 5 and expects to ship the final code in February.
The Raleigh, N.C.-based Linux distributor, which formally released the beta two version on Friday, said it has made few changes to the code since the first beta was released in September but noted that engineers have fixed about 300 bugs and improved the documentation.
All that's left to do is some additional refinement and testing before shipment, Red Hat executives said.
"It's our last planned beta. We'll go to release candidate in January, and we'll be releasing final product in the middle of the quarter, [probably] a February ship date," said Nick Carr, product marketing director for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) is the company's first Linux distribution with Xen virtualization. Though it will trail behind Novell in the market by six months, it's worth the wait, company executives said. RHEL 5 will offer support for the most recent Linux kernel, version 2.618, and the latest incarnation of Xen, Xen 3.01, although the final code may support for Xen 3.02. Red Hat executives said that will give customers a more elegant and integrated server and storage virtualization solution.
"The basic virtualization capability for both [Linux distributions] came from the Xen open-source project, but we picked a much later version [of Xen]," Carr said. "Since then, Novell released major enhancements to the scheduler and networking subsystems."
Red Hat said support for the Red Hat Global File System will be incorporated into a future release of the Linux kernel, which will benefit RHEL users. Red Hat's GFS and Cluster Logical Volume, too, will be integrated with Xen to allow applications and data to be accessed and shared by any guest operating system.
Moreover, integration between Xen's and Red Hat's clustering technology will enable high availability and failover at the application level or at the virtual machine level, Red Hat executives said.
Red Hat also has integrated Xen-based virtual machine support into its Red Hat Network GUI manager and developed a set of standard interfaces that will enable customers to instantly provision guest OSes and start, stop, shut down and destroy virtual machines on the fly.
Ken Mclaurin, senior marketing manager of open-source and virtualization services at Akibia, a Westborough, Mass.-based Red Hat partner, said his initial concerns about RHEL 5 beta one were addressed quickly by Red Hat. He added that RHEL 5's support for Xen will enable him to grow his virtualization business and integrate Red Hat with other Xen platforms.
"RHEL 5 Xen implementation, when combined with a management tool like Virtual Iron's, provides our customers with a better-performing, viable alternative to other expensive proprietary virtualization schemes for less," Mclaurin said.
