Experiences with RHEL6 Beta 2.1

Like promised I’ll keep you updated on the RHEL6b2.1. The “official name” is not Beta2.1, it is “Beta 2 refresh”. Why not calling it Beta3? Anyway: The good news first: In contrary to the first release of Beta 2, it works fine again! The first release of Beta2 was quite crappy, it was not installable as a KVM guest. This was obviously due to severe bugs in some virtio drivers.

So, what are the news?

1. The bugs in the virtio drivers have been fixed, you can deploy RHEL6 in KVM environments again.
2. The vmware_ballooning driver has been backported.
3. A lot of minor bugs have been fixed, see the announcement.

Especially point two is cool, running RHEL6 in a VMware ESX environment does not necessarily need the vmware-tools installed anymore. RHEL6 now provides all three important vm-ware related drivers: The vmxnet3, vmware_ballooning and pvscsi. At the end of the day, this means one can dismiss the always-hated vmware-tools. A test of the behavior w/o vmware-tools by a ESX specialist is pending.

The alternative of vmware-tools are the open-vm-tools. This would add the benefit of controlled shutdown of the ESX guest with the vCenter tools. Since VMware does not provide (yet) RHEL 6 packages of the open-vm-tools I was unable to test it.

I made the same brief tests as I reported here. It seems that Red Hat is back on track, RHEL6b2.1 is reliable and not far away from being ready for production.

When can we expect a Beta3? Will there even be a next beta, or is Red Hat release a RC1 soon? There is still no published release schedule, all we know is “later this year”.

Anyway: Download Beta2.1 and test it, its a pretty cool release. If you find bugs, report them.

Have fun!

2 thoughts on “Experiences with RHEL6 Beta 2.1

  1. Shantanu says:

    Hi,
    Thanks for the article, wasn’t sure what had changed (except the kernel version, of course).

    Do you know why there is such a reduction in the size? between b2 and b2.1.

    Also, would it be possible to provide torrents of b2.1? The jigdo thing is so annoying! (Even a .zsync would do)

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