14 DAY TRIAL // On March 14, Red Hat has presented its newest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux at a media event in San Francisco. After nearly four years of development and several collaborations with strategic partners such as IBM, the newest version of RHEL now offers integrated Real-Time Linux capabilities, improved virtualization features and security enhancements.
The new operating system will be distributed as two main sets, Server and Client, each with its own variants. Server comes in two flavors: a base server, which allows up to four virtual machines and as the Advanced Platform, which allows unlimited virtualizations. The Client set comes in four variants: Desktop, which is suitable for office and productivity workers, Workstation, suitable for high-end power user and then virtualization for both, but limited on each flavor to four virtual machines.
Besides officially including support for virtualization, Big Blue and Red Hat developers have collaborated with the open-source community to build SELinux (Security Enhanced Linux) into the new operating system's core in order to provide Multilevel Security capabilities. These capabilities enable enterprise customers, such as those in the government sector, to classify information as secret, top secret or confidential by creating a mandatory access control policy.
Other features available in the new RHEL include:
￭ GUI tools for management ￭ Para-virtualized RHEL 5 and RHEL 4 update 5 ￭ Full virtualized for 3rd party operating systems ￭ The new 2.6.18 kernel, included into the current version, won't be changed in order to maintain compatibility; it will only have security fixes and relevant backports added to it ￭ Support for Intel Network Accelerator Technology ￭ SELinux with SEtroubleshooter GUI tool ￭ Several IPSEC enhancements ￭ New Audit features which provide powerful new searching/reporting and real-time monitoring.
Red Hat announced the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS and subscription model in October 2003. Now, nearly four years later, the model has been nailed down and Red Hat is taking the next step in its evolution as an open source company.