Red Hat Releases RHEL 5.1, Includes Virtualization

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.'"

yesterday's news today

[asv108]

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:yesterday's news today

[SleeknStealthy]

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:yesterday's news today

[Anonymous Coward]

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:Does anyone know...

[baggins2001]

Currently their virtualization is based on Xen, but when I recently talked with a RH employee involved in this part, they hinted to a strong possibility of switching to KVM. Basically they said these commands can change, but if you learn how to do it with these commands then you won't have to worry as much about changes in the framework. The commands he was pushing me away from were Xen specific.
Sorry I forget the reason for why they might change, but it had to do with compatibility and ease of use.
At the time I was a little confused as to whether it was a good thing they were dynamic enough to change or a bad thing. But I think that they have worked with Xen a long time and there were be pretty good reasons to change from a customer/business point of view.

Re:But can it do....

[DaveWick79]

Virtualization is not a new feature for RedHat Enterprise. Advanced Server 5.0 already supports unlimited guest OS's. According to RedHat's web site (for Enterprise 5.0), the only product they support running in virtualization is, you guessed it, RedHat Enterprise.
According to the article, it sounds like the only thing they added for 5.1 is support for Windows guests.

Re:yesterday's news today

[Znork]

"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:yesterday's news today

[Sosarian]

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.

Re:One question:

[Nibbler999]

They would be aiming get that out within 2 weeks.

Re:Live migration?

[jsolan]

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.