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 ….Read More

What is possibly going into RHEL6 GA and what is not

As I wrote different times before, RHEL6 is going to have a Kernel based on upstreams 2.6.32 Kernel. Meanwhile Linus Torvalds and his fellows released 2.6.34. Since then – from a System Engineers Point of view – there have some “minor” changes which are affecting the daily work in enterprise environments. I think that Red Hat is aware that RHEL6 is one of its most important releases made so far. RHEL6 Beta-Testers have acknowledged that this is one of the ….Read More

Red Hat’s virtualization strategy has redundancy – Quo vadis?

A couple of days there have been some reports that Red Hat will release a commercialized version of deltacloud, an abstraction layer for different kinds of virtualization technologies and clouds such as VMware, RHEV, Amazon EC2 etc. Red Hat puts a lot of resources on virtualization, they maintain and/or sponsor multiple projects in parallel. The most important from my point of view is libvirt which is as well an abstraction layer for different virtulization technologies such as VMware, KVM, Xen ….Read More

KVM supports live migration between CPUs with different features

The video is a bit old, it is from November 2008. But it is still quite interesting to see and discuss about it. With KVM you can upgrade your farm of servers easy, it does not matter if the new servers have CPUs with new features or not. I’m not sure if you can do this with ESX, I guess not, you probably need to migrate them shut down. httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuhU6jJjpAQ Have fun!

A brief test of RHEL 6 Beta 1

As promised yesterday, I publish the results of a brief test of RHEL6 Beta 1 and the most important findings. It is my point of view as a system guys daily business. If not stated, this overview is based on a default installation with no customization. General There are new package groups such asĀ  “Minimal” with 228 Packages and “Basic Server” with 523 Packages. “Basic Server” is the default installation, which means the default click trough installation compared to RHEL5 ….Read More

Kernel questions about RHEL6, ESX support and experiences with F13a3

Still no official informations Red Hat is still refusing any questions about the features of RHEL 6 and its Linux Kernel. However: Since Vanilla Kernel 2.6.33 vmxnet3 and pvscsi is supported. Fedora 13 Alpha 3 is shipped with a derivate of Kernel 2.6.33. I still hope that Red Hat is switching to 2.6.33 or back-porting the VMWare code to its 2.6.32 derivative Kernel as known by RHEL 6 Alpha 3. Experiences with F13a3 so far Installing F13a3 on a ESX ….Read More

Where the heck is RHEL6?

Release cycle slowed down In the past Red Hat has released a new version of its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) roughly every two years. RHEL5 was released on march 2007. Compared to the past release cycle, RHEL6 is overdue since one year. Official information There is only little known about the upcoming features of RHEL6. On the Red Hat Summit 2009, there was a presentation held by Tim Burke which gives just some hints that RHEL6 is actually approaching, ….Read More