RHEL 5.5 - extra lube for your KVMs

Red Hat's Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 5.5 has reached the beta stage with downloads available for those with a subscription to the Red Hat Network. Typically, most news involving Red Hat's familiar, free Linux distro Fedora comes from the client software - such as GNOME updates and other desktop tools. But with the new …

[Anonymous Coward]

Is their documentation still lacking?

While their documentation (at least for Red Hat Directory Server for example) is quite extensive, I think it was really written for the developer in the next cube, not for administrators to actually use for design, installation and maintenance. There are too many steps that are either ambiguous or simply left out as if we can all read between the lines.

Otherwise, I think it's a superb product.

[Anonymous Coward]

KVM?

I found myself initially wondering what RHEL had to do with peripheral switches.

We really need an international body to enforce some kind of standard in abbreviations...

[Chris Miller]

KVM?

Isn't that Keyboard-Video-Mouse? Looks like the IETF needs a TLA RFC.

[Displacement Activity]

No thanks

"The new KVM tools and additional device support will make RHEL 5.5 well worth the upgrade when the final release does arrive later this year".

Not so fast. Anyone who actually runs virtualisation isn't even going to look at, let alone "upgrade", their host OS, unless the alternative is imminent disaster. Who's going to switch from Xen to KVM just because there's better KVM support in 5.5? RH have done nothing to improve their Xen support for the last 18 months; hardly surprising, given that they paid $108M for Qumranet/KVM. I'll just move to a different distribution when I have to.

That leaves the additional device support. But, if your problem is fancy hardware, then you're perhaps not going to be running RedHat in the first place.

[TrevorH]

Yes but where is RHEL6!

RHEL6: Only a year late and not even in beta yet!

[Anonymous Coward]

Following Bill's example...?

In an attempt to emulate teh closed source experience more closely redhat will need to delay RHEL6 for at least another year.

Think of the certification revenue they're losing!

[Dom 3]

Power7 - Embedded - WTF?

Don't you mean Power7 servers/

[Squirrel]

<3 xen

The 2 (xen vs kvm) are totally different approaches. I'd like to see those in charge of xen in Cambridge really start pushing it again as it's lost a lot of momentum.

Maybe dynamic provisioning is the way forward as a marketing point.

If I had cash to spend and needed proper non-static virtualisation then vmware would be my choice. Static, I'd probably stick with xen on centos for now, no need to fix what isn't broken.

[Goat Jam]

Those in charge of Xen

That would be Citrix, yes?