Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4 now available

Red Hat released the fourth update in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family.

This release adds commercial support for technologies such as FCoE (Fiber Channel over Ethernet) for storage environments and SR-IOV to improve virtual I/O performance and management. We also continue to enhance our management interfaces, such as OpenIPMI, OpenHPI and libvirt. These open interfaces aim to improve the portability and functionality of third-party and our own management tools.

New versions of SystemTap and blktrace allow performance diagnosis of a running applications and the application interaction with key subsystems such as networking, memory and storage.

Because KVM is integrated into the Linux kernel, it takes full advantage of the operating environment. This includes hardware and application support. Hardware and software certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 should be transparently certified for virtual guests as well. System tools, including management, SELinux security and Red Hat Network all work in both physical, virtual, host and guest deployments.

Because this is an update in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 family, Xen and KVM can both be managed via the open standard libvirt. This provides customers with their choice of virtualization technology with a common management interface. In addition, support of Xen has not ceased – it will continue to be supported through the full lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. The scalability of the Red Hat virtualization solution has been incremented to support 192 CPUs and 1GB hugepages.

KVM takes full advantage of the latest in chip hardware advances. Performance, scalability, security and stability are enhanced by the tight linkage to Intel VT and AMD-V hardware virtualization. By following the PCI-SIG’s SR-IOV specification and delivered on AMD and Intel chipsets, virtual device enables the efficient and secure sharing of physical devices in both KVM and Xen virtualization.