Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Has Support for the Latest Server Processors

Red Hat has announced the release of the latest update to its current Linux operating system for the business environment. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.5 comes with broader hardware support, including for some of the latest server processor lines from the biggest players on the market, Intel, AMD and IBM. It also supports some newer products coming from its hardware vendor partners. Virtualization capabilities also got some improvements and RHEL 5.5 plays nice with Windows 7, which was launched after RHEL 5.4 was released.

"We believe that Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to drive the evolution of the operating platform forward with new technology that delivers performance, reliability, scalability and affordability results for our customers," Tim Burke, VP of engineering, Platform Engineering at Red Hat, said in the press release. "Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a powerful foundation for physical, virtual and cloud deployments, and for many, continues to be the platform of choice for their most demanding mission-critical workloads."

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 is powered by Linux kernel 2.6.18-194.EL5, the latest update to the rather ancient release. Still, it sports support for the most cutting-edge server hardware including for the Intel Nehalem EX, AMD Opteron 6000 Series, codenamed "Magny Cours," and IBM Power 7 processor lines. It also boasts an extensive list of new network and storage device drivers and several generic devices as well.

Virtualization options are more solid in RHEL 5.5, especially since the KVM virtualization scheme first introduced in RHEL 5.4 is now more mature. Because the new release supports servers with greater amounts of RAM, it can run more guest machines on the same hardware. Red Hat says RHEL 5.5 is capable of hosting a virtual machine that can "saturate a 10 Gigabit Ethernet" connection.

On the software side, OpenOffice.org and Samba have both been updated. And finally, RHEL 5.5 has a better Microsoft Active Directory integration and is also designed to be interoperable with Windows 7, the latest operating system from the Redmond software giant. Other updates were introduced in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 Beta.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5 is available for download here on Softpedia.