Smoothwall Firewall project

Friday 24 July 2009

Redhat puts next Enterprise version into beta

Redhat announced several months ago about it's new virtualization strategy, and all the new tools that it would offer over the next 18 months. Well one of those building blocks has gone into beta, and I expect it to get shipped - version 5.4 - around the Redhat summit in Chicago at the beginning of September.

The main features I was looking for were enhancements in all the virtualization components, and I haven't been disappointed, all of the building blocks have had major upgrades, plus the inclusion of KVM, which currently appears only in the x86_64 version. Things like virt-manager which normally only get a minor point bump, have seen a big change from 5.3 to 6.1

The kernel has been bumped up to 2.6.18-155 kernel, and all the other major components have had the usual patches and updates. As with all these point releases, you are not going to see much difference on the cover, it's what has been happening underneath on this one that is important.

If you use Redhat for your virtualization host platform, then this latest release will definitely be of interest to you. I will post back once I have run it up on real hardware to test the KVM, as the i386 version just offers the Xen improvements.

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