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Red Hat Releases RHEL 5.1, Includes Virtualization 63

Posted by Zonk from the you-can't-beat-better-toys dept.
eldavojohn writes "Red Hat has announced their release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1, which includes integrated virtualization. Also of note, 'Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also available on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a web service that provides resizeable compute capacity in the cloud. This collaboration makes all the capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including the Red Hat Network management service, world-class technical support and over 3,400 certified applications, available to customers on Amazon's proven network infrastructure and datacenters.'"
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Red Hat Releases RHEL 5.1, Includes Virtualization More

Red Hat Releases RHEL 5.1, Includes Virtualization

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  • Cool (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But does it run ...? Er. Never mind.

  • yesterday's news today (Score:5, Informative)

    by asv108 ( 141455 ) <asv@@@ivoss...com> on Thursday November 08, 2007 @04:15PM (#21285519) Homepage Journal
    5.1 was announced yesterday, along with a swarm of press releases. [redhat.com] Its funny how Redhat doesn't mention Xen anywhere, and you really have to dig to find out its just Xen. The Redhat press releases and marketing make it sound like they developed their own virtualization layer.

    Many of other distros have included Xen for quite some time.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by SleeknStealthy ( 746853 )
      Who do you think primary developed Xen? Not to excuse the outside developers so yes they should have included the project name, but maybe Redhat should get some credit for the work.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Courageous ( 228506 )
        Who do you think primary (sic) developed Xen?

        The people at Xen Source primarily developed Xen.
        • *scoff*

          Do you really believe that?
          • The main, initial work on Xen was definitely done by the guys at XenSource. IBM, ,HP, Intel, Fujitsu, Novell, AMD & Redhat, among others, are also significant contributors, but RedHat is nowhere near the biggest one. Just doing a quick grep on the xen unstable changelogs, RedHat appears to be the one that have originated the least number of patches out of all the aforementioned contributing companies, although "number of patches" is not necessarily a significant measure of the value of someone's contri
          • Of course, yes. I believe that.

            C//

      • Who do you think primarily developed Xen?
        Maybe the people who sold Xen to Citrix? http://www.citrixxenserver.com/Pages/default.aspx [citrixxenserver.com] Just guessing.

    • Re:yesterday's news today (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 08, 2007 @04:22PM (#21285611)
      Red Hat isn't interested in promoting Xen because they are trying to make their ultimate virtualization product agnostic to any specific virtualization engine. The power of their offering is in the libvert management tools that they are leading development on and in their Satellite offering for remote deployment.

    • Re:yesterday's news today (Score:4, Funny)

      by ms1234 ( 211056 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @04:46PM (#21285957)
      And today Fedora 8 was released.

    • Re:yesterday's news today (Score:5, Informative)

      by Znork ( 31774 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @04:50PM (#21286015)
      "The Redhat press releases and marketing make it sound like they developed their own virtualization layer."

      Essentially they've developed their own interaction layer around the virtualization layer. While Xen is the furthest along for the moment, RedHat, it seems, aims to be hypervisor agnostic as far as the management goes.

      "Many of other distros have included Xen for quite some time."

      Including Fedora and Redhat (and as far as stabilizing Xen3 enough to be usable on various mainstream kernels they've done an impressive job; having played around with Xen since FC4 I can recall the fun of building my own xen kernels from the xen mainline and getting them to play nice. It used to be significantly more painful back then.).

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Sosarian ( 39969 )
      And the Xen guys want it that way. They don't want you using their trademark.

      Sounds odd to me, but that's their business.
    • I agree with the slow news, but to clarify the Xen point:

      Redhat has also included Xen for quite some time, if you take that to mean since earlier this year. They've also been touting their virtualization abilities since RHEL 5.

      Novell also offers virtualization (through Xen), and you'll notice that they take the same stance as RedHat: Our virtualization is hot as snot, and nothing can compare.

      I'm glad everyone is making cool front ends to Xen. Point and drool folk need that. But please, make the companies pu
    • You know Xen has a bunch of hype, but I can't help but notice when I use xen the only thing that appears in the process table is qemu. Makes one wonder if all this hype isn't just a newer version of qemu.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by jazzkat ( 901547 )
        Stry_Cat, I'm not sure how you're using Xen, but unless you're runing QEmu specifically, you shouldn't see QEmu in your process table on any of your domains. Xen-based machines or kernels are not user processes like QEmu machines are; in fact, Xen and QEmu are completely unrelated. On my CentOS-5 based home machine, the dom0 running a couple of domU children provides the following evidence that Xen is running:

        9 ? S< 0:00 [xenwatch]
        10 ? S< 0:00 [xenbus]
        1363 pts/0 S+ 0:00 grep -i xen
        25

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by ekeko ( 570487 ) *
      I am not promoting this, just mentioning that Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 64-bit (which is based on RedHat Linux 5 I believe) comes with Xen kernels and software.
      I have tried it out running an instance of OEL 5 (64-bit) as a dom0, an Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (64-bit) as a domU, and an Oracle Enterprise Linux 4.4 (32-bit) as a domU.
      The domains startup well, and disk I/O performance seems to be close to native speed.
      More tests are required though. In particular testing NFS performance and installation O
    • It's old news that Xensource have put their lawyers on the task of defending their Xen brand. So really, redhat are actually forced to not mention the brand as part of their product, if they did, they'd probably have a lawsuit on their hands. Sure, it's Xen, but they can't call it Xen, atleast not in their product description, just like CentOS is RHEL, but you can't call it that...

  • Live migration? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) * <chris@swiedler.org> on Thursday November 08, 2007 @04:17PM (#21285549)
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualization includes the ability to perform live migration, allowing customers to seamlessly move running applications from one server to another...

    How good is the live migration support? Has anyone used it?

    Is this based on Xen or something else?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pembo13 ( 770295 )
      Based on Xen.

    • Re:Live migration? (Score:5, Informative)

      by jsolan ( 1014825 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @05:15PM (#21286339)
      We've upgraded all our 5 servers to 5.1 in the past 2 days, all of which are Xen dom0.
      The live migration of fully virtualized (hvm) guests is now supported and works swimmingly well. There is 0 downtime, only a small hiccup in the network connection, which is not noticeable unless you are watching for it. We've transferred mid-download on the domU and have not dropped a packet.
      The only issue we've really had is having to re-setup the NIC cards of HVM guests after the upgrade. They apparently see a different (better?) piece of hardware for the virutalized network card.
      Live migration of paravirtualized guests has always worked well and continues to do so.

      ACPI is now supported in windows guests, which is a big bonus for us.
      32-bit paravirtualized guest also work on 64-bit dom0's. This is only a "technology preview" but so far has worked pretty good (for the day and half we've had a system running on it). However live migration from a 64-bit host to a 32-bit host (and vice versa) does not appear to work. I've not delved into it enough to find the problem though.
    • I'm using xen 3.0.x on opensuse 10.1 and opensuse 10.2 and live migration works great. However, you can't migrate virtualized disks, so the domU's need to be diskless. We're using iSCSI.
    • Live migration rocks. I have used it many times in Xen 3.1 between AMD x86-64 machines.
  • Earlier this week at woek an Amazon rep present on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) [amazon.com]. I didn't expect much, but the presentation at least sounded pretty impressive. So the RH on Amazon compute servers is something I and others should check out.

  • Kerberos 1.6 Support! Yeah! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zombie Ryushu ( 803103 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @04:22PM (#21285619)
    What makes me happy: Kerberos 1.6 ewith LDAP Backend! Hell yeah! OpenAFS 1.4, Fuck yeah! No more maintaining two databases for Kerberos and one for everything else: Win and God.
    • Maybe my university will update its machines. I'm not sure if it's because they have some long term support with RH but Debian stable seems more up to date compared to my box...

  • One question: (Score:3, Interesting)

    by corychristison ( 951993 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @04:48PM (#21285979)
    When does the CentOS alternative come out? ;-) [slashdot.org]
  • I finally figured out why 'virtualization' bugs me so much.
    Its TIMESHARING! Duh! ( Not timeslicing! )

  • It's even kind of surreal, knowing that Red Hat 6.0 was released in 1999. I still have a copy of the original Red Hat 5.x release from 1998.

    I realize it's a different product and all, but it's kind of weird that this sounds like 1998 all over again.

    • Yeah now that you mention it, Red Hat 5.1 was the first Linux distro (or *nix of any kind for that matter) I'd ever tried. It wasn't that long before I decided I preferred Debian Slink and OpenBSD 2.6 though :)

  • kvm should be looked into if you are considering (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bl8n8r ( 649187 ) on Thursday November 08, 2007 @06:10PM (#21287157)
    I've had 4 windows 2000 servers running under kvm[0] (on centos 5.0 host). The performance seemed about the same as vmware, albeit I wasn't able to get dnsmasq and VDE[1] running correctly. Anyway, kvm is rolled into the centos 5 kernel and it does GUI where Xen does not. It's a bit ragged to setup, but looks promising.

    [0] - http://kvm.qumranet.com/kvmwiki [qumranet.com]
    [1] - http://wiki.virtualsquare.org/index.php/VDE [virtualsquare.org]
    • "and it does GUI where Xen does not"

      What do you mean by this? The graphics support in Xen and KVM is pretty much the same, given that they both use qemu for VGA emulation. If you're talking admin-Gui on CentOS, it's virt-manager for both.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bl8n8r ( 649187 )
        > What do you mean by this? I had read that Xen was not able to support GUI environments and could only be used with textmode/console based OS flavors. Perhaps I've misunderstood.
  • Diversification. That is a very dangerous proposition, especialy for a company which, while highly valued, is not THAT profitable.

    They started with the books.
    then doing stores fr other merchants.
    Then a search engine.
    Now datacenters.

    Wish them well, but honest to god, I donot know how that may end well.
  • .... before I can run RHEL, XP and Leopard virtualised on my PC? THAT'll be what I call "cloud" computing. That aside, now I can install Linux with XP virtualised for all my friends and clients, advising them to do all their internet work on Linux, keep the NIC disabled on XP and limit XP to games and proprietary software not available on Linux. Gradually ween them off Windows.
    • Unlikely unless they're playing solitaire since the graphics hardware the Windows VM will see is not the real system hardware, and thus none of their apps will be accelerated.
  • With the release of Redhat 5 back in spring, someone at Redhat mentioned [news.com] that they were working on KVM, does anyone know if Redhat is planning to drop Xen in favor of KVM with next release?

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