Quoting IT Business

“It think it's going to be great,” Paul Kerr, president of Toronto's Scalar Decisions, said of the release this month of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.0.

“I think it will mean a big impact for our business.”

That's largely because it includes the Xen hypervisor for virtualizing multiple operating systems within separate partitions, he said.

Red Hat believes by including virtualization technology in its enterprise server it can lure customers away from paying for virtualization from VMWare.

However, Novell beat Red Hat by including Xen technology in its Suse Enteprise Linux Server 10 last year.

Kerr also said Red Hat is about to refine its channel program, elements of which his firm has been testing because it is one of five North American strategic business partners.

A spokesman for Red Hat could not be reached at press time to get details of the changes.

But Kerr said that changes include Red Hat allowing qualified partners to work with it in delivering professional services. In effect, the VAR will be a Red Hat subcontractor.

Scalar and other strategic partners have done it for several years, but Kerr said Red Hat now wants to formalize the practice.

Changes will also include an increase in MDF funds available to partners.

It's been exactly two years since the last upgrade of RHEL, and company executives are touting the changes, particularly Xen.

“It allows the channel to move up the value chain because (virtualization) becomes a richer infrastructure play,” said Joel Berman, a Red Hat product manager.

Many companies have restricted virtualization to test and development, he said. With the technology built into the server, he believes it will be put into production.

Simplify offerings
But there are other changes as well. RHEL now comes in only two versions, standard (which allows only up to four virtualized guest operating systems) and Advanced Platform (which allows an unlimited number of guests).

Previously there were three versions, but the company said it wanted to simplify its offerings.

Security enhancements include tools to turn on SE Linux, a secure set of features created by the U.S. National Security Agency.

There's also new software development tools and increased support for iSCSI networks, improved interoperability with Unix and Windows.

In addition, the company has created three special turnkey versions:

• Datacentre Solution, with extra tools including systems management, provisioning and high availability for creating a data centre;
• Database Availability Solution, a platform for enabling high availability databases; and
• High Performance Computing Solution, for researchers and engineers needing difficult computational problems.

Pricing was not available at press time for these packages.

Also rolled out was Red Hat Enterprise Desktop 5.0, which includes systems management tools that integrate with Red Hat Network, a Web-based management tool.

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