Red Hat Readies RHEL 5 for March 14 Launch

Rob writes "The wait is almost over. It may have taken two weeks longer than Red Hat would have liked, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the updated version of the company's commercial Linux platform, will be launched along with a bevy of new products and services on March 14. The delivery of RHEL 5, the fourth major commercial server release for Red Hat, will better position its Linux against Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 as well as Windows, Unix, and proprietary platforms. RHEL 5 has been cooking for more than two years and includes changes to the Linux kernel. In addition to the support for the Xen hypervisor, RHEL 5 also has an integrated version of Red Hat Cluster Suite, the company's high availability clustering software, as well as support for iSCSI disk arrays, InfiniBand with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), and the SystemTap kernel probing tool."

Re:The wait is almost over?

[MartinG]

If you read the text a bit more carefully you will notice they were not specifically talking about you in particular. There exists a set of people who either use or intend to use RHEL. I imagine a subset of these are the ones likely to be waiting.

Redhat Dominates enterprise

[Anonymous Coward]

Like it or not, Redhat dominates the enterprise corporate and government markets for Linux. RHEL5 is highly anticipated and looked forward to, it has many nice features listed. However, until it is released, any discussion about it is really rhetoric.

As for being dominant, there is a thing in any industry that if you are the first, its very hard to lose that position. Redhat was first to the commercial sector. Other distributions qualities may rock, but Redhat was still first, and its position in the market will continue to reflect that.

Re:Red Hat doesn't matter anymore

[weeble]

You might want to consider who paid for writing the kernel.

How much effort was put in to fixing bugs by people paid for by Red Hat.

Software developed by Red Hat includes projects such as Network Manager, Totem etc.

This all costs money and Red Hat funds a lot of development. I do not see Ubuntu on the following list:
Top (kernel) lines changed by employer
(Unknown) 740990 29.5%
Red Hat 361539 14.4%
(None) 239888 9.6%
IBM 200473 8.0%
QLogic 91834 3.7%
Novell 91594 3.6%
Intel 78041 3.1%
MIPS Technologies 58857 2.3%
Nokia 39676 1.6%
SANPeople 36038 1.4%

http://lwn.net/Articles/222773/ [lwn.net]

boring == good

[heinlein]

RHEL (or, for me, CentOS) is boring. It's not meant to run on the latest gamer PCs or laptops. It doesn't include proprietary video drivers. All it does is serve up bits without interruption: databases, web pages, DNS, DHCP, LDAP, files, login shells. Work gets done. Customers get served. Employees get paid. All without any danger/excitement! Boring is a feature, not a bug.

Re:R Hell

[tobiasly]

However, it's a bit disappointing that my employers were still paying a support contract on this box but the package updates that were part of this contract were more than 3 years old.

The point is that, even though the Python package may be 3 years old, if it's still under support, and tomorrow they found a security bug in that years-old version, you would still get a security patch for it.

I don't think it's too much to expect a little flexibility when you're paying for it.

That's the thing.. you're not paying for a little flexibility. You're paying for stability and maintenance. It may seem backwards to you but that's the exact sorta thing that most "enterprise" customers want. If they offered the sort of flexibility you're looking for, that would mean supporting multiple different versions of different packages within a single distro.

The reason they can offer such long-term support is that every user of every package in that distro is running the exact same version. It would simply not be economically possible for them to offer 7 years of support on a product if they allowed people to run whatever version they wanted, even as an option.

Re:When is Ubuntu Going to Compete with RedHat?

[gormanly]

Yep. And s/five/seven =)

Re:CentOS 5

[Anonymous Coward]

centos rocks

Thanks god there are people paying for rhel if they can afford it though.

Re:Where are the package listings?

[Wdomburg]

Hard to obtain how exactly? Go to ftp.redhat.com, look at a directory listing. RHEL5 isn't up yet, because it's not released, but there have been publicly available beta ISOs for months, so approximate versions are widely known. For example, distro watch [distrowatch.com] has a table listing versions of the major packages.

Re:R Hell

[d3xt3r]

If you run an enterprise application, stability is critical in terms of both operational reliability and package versions. While I agree with you that some of the higher level applications that could be kept more "fresh", Enterprise Linux targets an audience that tends to run mission critical applications on their operating systems. These companies deal with a number of third party ISVs who certify their products on Red Hat Linux. If software package versions are changing constantly, ISVs will refuse to certify said changes due to the cost of doing so.

This was one of the problems with Red Hat's pre-Enterprise Linux audiences. ISVs saw Linux as a moving target. I think Red Hat does a good job of freshening what they can with their point releases.

Simply put, if you need bleeding edge software, you'll need to find it from Fedora or a third party repository. There are a number of repositories out there, AT-RPMs, Dag, RPM Forge, etc. that package applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, for Linux to be enterprise-ready, core stability (again in terms of versioning and reliability are a must.

Re:Red Hat doesn't matter anymore

[walt-sjc]

Dude: work on your reading comprehension.

CentOS, via their Plus repository

Redhat doesn't HAVE a "Plus" repository, which is where CentOS puts recent versions of software for those that require it.

Since I can't get that for ANY price from RH, they actually have LESS value to me.

Here is a real world scenario. I have several racks full of blade servers. The hardware is identical. The configuration is identical. The software loaded is identical. These machines are all clones of each other. If I have a problem with the OS, it will affect all of them, and the fix will fix all of them. If cost of support of one machine is X, and I have N machines, the support cost and effort is not N*X, it's more like 2X. RH wants to charge me N*($Retail-20%) for "support." That's just not reasonable. RHEL is not Windows, and the Windows pricing model doesn't work for it.