Two years in the making, RHEL 5 is finally ready. The result? With Xen, SELinux, the Red Hat Global File System, and more, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 raises the bar for commercial Linux. We break down the new features and walk you through creating your first virtual machine.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has long been a fixture in enterprise machine rooms. Robust, fast, and feature-rich, RHEL is often the standard by which other enterprise distributions are measured. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL5), Red Hat once again raises the bar for commercial Linux. CIOs, don the Red Hat.
The most important feature of RHEL5 is the integration of Xen, an open source virtualization engine. While Linux has always been able to execute multiple applications all (seemingly) at the same time, virtualization takes “multiprocessing” further, turning a single piece of physical hardware into many virtual computers. Each virtual machine is independent and runs its own operating system instance — a flavor of Linux or Windows, say — on virtual hardware, oblivious to the low-level machinations that enable such sharing.
Virtualization is sure to change the real estate of the machine room. Red Hat estimates that a typical production server runs at only 15 to 20 percent of capacity. The remaining cycles — the processing power of four production servers — are simply wasted, lost to idle time. With virtualization, though, a single system can act in multiple roles simultaneously, conserving floor space, and reducing cooling and power consumption.
At the other extreme, the workload of a server approaching 100 percent utilization can be subdivided and reassigned to other, less-taxed servers. Similarly, a workload can be shifted from failing hardware to other hosts without noticeable downtime. For example, to repair a machine with a failing power supply, shift…
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