| Virtualization gets a boost in RHEL 5.3 |
Jan. 20, 2009
Red Hat announced the availability of a new version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that improves virtualization scalability. RHEL 5.3 also adds an implementation of the open-source OpenJDK Java technology, as well as support for Intel's Nehalem processor architecture, says Red Hat.
Virtualization was also the main event in last May's release of RHEL 5.2. Red Hat upgraded RHEL's core virtualization hypervisor, Xen, to version 3.1.2, and improved support for NUMA (Non-Uniform Memory Access) architectures. Other new RHEL 5.2 features included new security, clustering, desktop, and networking features.
With RHEL 5.3, the main focus appears to be on scaling virtualization capabilities to larger, more powerful x86-64 servers. RHEL can now support virtual servers with up to 32 virtual CPUs and 80GB of memory, and physical server limits have been expanded to 126 CPUs and 1TB main memory, claims Red Hat. Other new virtualization features are said to include support for Hugepage memory and Intel Extended Page Tables (EPT), both of which are said to improve virtual server performance.
A tip of the hat to Nehalem
Version 5.3 has also added support for the Intel Core i7 (Nehalem) processor platform. This quad-core, hyperthreaded 45nm processor is said by Intel to greatly improve energy-efficiency and offer four times the memory bandwidth of the fastest Intel Xeon processor systems. Unaudited internal test results show gains of 1.7x for commercial applications and gains up to 3.5x for high-performance applications compared to the Xeon, says Red Hat.
RHEL 5.3 for the first time implements OpenJDK, an open source "high-performance" version of Java SE 6, says Red Hat. Based on the same code base as Sun's JDK, RHEL's OpenJDK implementation is compatible with all applications written for Java SE 6 and previous versions, claims the company. Other new feature in version 5.3's list of 150 updates include general kernel, device driver, and architectural enhancements, says Red Hat, as well as simplified desktop networking and support of the GFS2 filesystem.
Stated Scott Crenshaw, VP, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat. "With the challenge to carve costs out of IT budgets, the flexibility, reliability and simplicity of an Enterprise Linux subscription has more value to customers than ever."
Availability
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.3 is available now, says Red Hat, More information may be found here.
-- Eric Brown
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