| Four good reasons to switch to RHEL 5 |
Mar. 14, 2007
Sometimes you don't want the hassle of the big upgrade. For example, there is no good reason to "upgrade" Windows to Vista. On the other hand, there are upgrades like Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) that give you some darn good reasons to make the jump.
Here are my four top reasons to change to RHEL 5:
1) Virtualization management
OK, so everyone and her uncle has a virtualization offering. Novell's SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) 10 has supported the Xen virtualization program for months now. KVM (kernel-based virtual machine for Linux) was the hot new feature in the latest Linux kernel, 2.6.20. OpenVZ, as well as SWSoft and Parallels (one open-source project, and two-companies in one) are doing excellent work, as well.
What Red Hat brings to the table ahead of the pack is virtualization management. Anyone can set up a VM (virtual machine) on Linux -- or, they can try. To set one up successfully, you really do have to know precisely what you're doing. With RHEL 5, any reasonably experienced system administrator should be able to set up VMs without yanking out major amounts of hair. Once in place, those VMs are also a lot easier to manage.
This is important.
A while back I talked with Al Gillen, vice president of research at IDC, and he told me, "The managing and provisioning and tracking of all this layered [virtualized] software through its full life-cycle is where the biggest competitive and financial battle is likely to come from."With RHEL 5, Red Hat has struck a major blow in the virtualization wars.
Another factor that many seem to miss is that, by incorporating virtualization and its management into one package, RHEL 5 users won't have to pay for additional virtualization software. As Scott Crenshaw, RHEL's general manager, said recently, "Our approach with virtualization is that the benefits of integrating with the OS are substantial and we can offer pricing models that are economically better."
Not only do you save money by using one VM to do the job that used to take three or four hardware servers, you can also save cash by bundling virtualization, virtualization management, and the operating system into one package. If I were a CFO looking to cut IT costs -- and aren't they always? -- RHEL 5 would sound real good to me.
2) Serious storage
Your simple workgroup or department server can get along with a single hard disk or RAID (redundant array of inexpensive disks), but serious server work these days requires serious storage technology. With Red Hat Cluster Suite, Red Hat Global File System, and Cluster Logical Volume Manager, Red Hat delivers the goods you need to manage terabytes of storage on your local server, on your SAN (storage area network), and across clusters.
RHEL 5 also comes with support for iSCSI disk arrays, and InfiniBand with RDMA (Remote Direct Memory Access). For those of you who like lots of storage on one file system, RHEL 5's Ext3 file system will now support 16-terabyte file systems. And that's a lot.
If you're already using Veritas for your corporate or datacenter storage management, don't worry: you can keep using it. Symantec Corp. announced on March 14 that it will be providing its core Veritas Storage Foundation, Veritas Cluster Server, and Veritas NetBackup solutions for customers as they adopt RHEL 5.
Symantec is also launching a beta program to unite its Storage Foundation and Dynamic Multi-pathing technologies with Xen virtualization. If this works as planned, it will allow managers to use and centrally manage storage virtualization and I/O multi-pathing with VMs.
Notice that word "virtualization" again? By uniting VMs with virtual storage, Red Hat has created a system that's compelling both for technologists and bean-counters. Powerful and easy on the budget -what's not to like?
3) Security
Linux is already a secure operating system. In RHEL 5, Red Hat has made SELinux (security-enhanced Linux) much easier to deploy and maintain than it was in its earlier version.
The problem with SELinux, as many Linux system administrators know to their sorrow, is that configuring it properly was a major pain in the rump. It was so annoying that many managers simply turned it off.
The root of this problem was that it came with few pre-set policies for RHEL applications. You'd have to come up with your own; and that's a job for a security specialist, not most system administrators. Now, with pre-built SELinux policies for more than 170 programs, most of your applications will run securely without any undue fuss.
If you still run into trouble, Red Hat has also provided the SELinux Troubleshooter. This tool that makes it a heck of a lot easierto figure out if an application is having trouble with a security policy. Better still, it can show you how to fix it so that the program can run securely.
For those of you whose companies require security testing proof before you buy anything, IBM hardware and RHEL 5 are already being evaluated for Common Criteria EAL (Evaluated Assurance Level) 4+, LSPP (Labeled Security Protection Profile), RBAC (Role Based Access Control Protection Profile), and CAPP (Controlled Access Protection Profile) security certifications.
4) Better application server functionality
IBM and Red Hat are also delivering a new real-time Linux application development and deployment platform. This new platform includes IBM WebSphere Real Time, a real-time J2SE (Java 2 Platform Standard Edition) Java Virtual Machine, with a real-time version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 running on IBM System x and BladeCenter AMD- and Intel-based servers.
So if you want to move, say, credit-card operations or any real-time Java application to Linux, RHEL 5 will command your attention. Of course, with Red Hat's own JBoss, you might choose another way to build high-performance Java applications.
It's not just the fancier stuff like real-time applications though that has been improved in RHEL 5, though. To take just one example, RHEL 5 has moved all the way up to PHP 5.1.6 from RHEL 4's mere PHP 4.3.9. In terms of PHP functionality -- a critical part of the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python) application stack -- this is a major step forward. While moving your applications from PHP 4 to PHP 5 can be time-consuming, the gains your users will see in performance will make it more than worth your developers' time.
You know, I've barely touched all the changes that Red Hat has made to RHEL and to the software that comes with it. I just decided that I wasn't going to give you a laundry list. To me, the reasons listed above are more than enough for any company to consider upgrading from an older Linux system to RHEL 5.
When you consider RHEL 5's virtualization and storage cost savings, its high-end security and improved application support, you have to agree that this Linux is a serious challenger for any server replacement you may be considering. Solaris, Server 2003, AIX, whatever: RHEL 5 is the first 21st century operating system. All companies from the smallest mom-and-pop shop to the largest global enterprise should give it some serious consideration.
-- Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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