Red Hat to put virtualisation in spotlight

Xen support due to arrive with RHEL 5 on Wednesday, but IT waits on licensing details

Red Hat will this week release its latest business Linux distribution, packing in virtualisation support for the first time as well as updating other capabilities in its first major release since February 2005.

Due to be formally announced on Wednesday, undoubtedly the biggest new feature in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 is the inclusion of XenSource’s Xen hypervisor, which lets Red Hat host Windows, Linux and Unix guest operating systems.

Red Hat has taken an interesting position on virtualisation over the last 12 months. Novell included Xen support in Suse Linux last July but Red Hat insisted that Xen was not mature enough to be included at that point. Also, Red Hat recently said it planned to support the KVM open-source virtualisation effort in the next version of Fedora, its product for enthusiasts.

That situation has led to speculation about how Red Hat will package virtualisation in RHEL 5.

“Xen is going to be the big one, primarily because Novell beat Red Hat to the punch,” said Neil Macehiter of analyst firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton.“The KVM involvement adds a bit of extra spice but the pricing model will also be interesting as Red Hat has been quite vocal about its ability to differentiate on price.”

Macehiter said that by corralling smaller software vendors, Red Hat could help make sense of software licensing for customers perplexed by the vagaries of terms relating to virtualisation and multicore processors.

Another key capability of RHEL 5 is integral support for clustered failover via the Red Hat Cluster Suite. Other features include support for the 2.6.18 kernel, quad-core x86 processors and iSCSI arrays.