Although its next major commercial release is still many months away, Red
Hat is letting everyone know what major new technology enhancements to
expect from its enterprise Linux distribution.
For those that don’t want to wait for the next Red Hat Enterprise Linux
release, the virtualization and thin client capabilities that Red Hat has expanded and calls Stateless Linux are already offered by other open source projects.
Red Hat today announced that Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, expected in 2006, will include
“fully integrated server virtualization capability.” That capability is
expected to be achieved working with the Xen open source virtualization
community. The Xen project got the backing of
IBM in January 2005 and has been included as part of
Novell’s SUSE Linux since version 9.3 was released
in March.
The virtualization effort by Red Hat will optimize its core operating
system platform for virtualized environments and also provide for
integration with other Red Hat technologies, such as its Global
File System clustered storage file format and its network systems
management platform.
The Xen project’s lead commercial sponsor, XenSource, which is operated by
the original Xen development team including Xen project leader Ian Pratt,
sees Red Hat’s intent to include virtualization next year as being
tremendously important.
Simon Crosby, vice president of strategy at XenSource, noted that in addition to
Red Hat’s enterprise distro, Novell intends to ship Xen in SUSE Linux
Enterprise server 10 as well.
“XenSource is working hard with both distros to ensure that we meet their
code upstream dates and to ensure interoperability of all vendors’ Xen
based solutions in the market,” Crosby told internetnews.com. “We are
delighted that Red Hat and SuSE both see a way to monetize Xen within their
distributions.”
Xen is not only specific to Linux: Sun has ported Solaris x86 to
Xen, and Crosby pointed out that Xen 3.0 provides hardware-assisted
virtualization for non-paravirtualized operating systems such as Windows on Intel VT
processors.
Red Hat users need not necessarily wait until 2006 and RHEL 5 to take
advantage of Xen virtualization. Crosby suggested that Red Hat users
can take advantage of it as soon as Xen 3.0 ships.
The community, with the help of key development partners AMD, Dell, HP,
IBM and Intel, is actively testing Xen 3.0 now and is on track
for a December release. According to Crosby, the distros and OEMs are
committed to working with XenSource after the Xen 3.0 community release to
further harden and performance-tune Xen.
“RHEL 4 will run superbly on Xen 3.0, which supports SMP guests and large
address space configurations, as well as Intel’s VT,” Crosby said.
The other key technology outlined by Red Hat for 2006 is something it
calls “Stateless Linux.” Similar to a thin client, Red
Hat’s stateless Linux project, which is under development partially via its
Community-based Fedora Project, aims to have the “mobility and flexibility
of a standard desktop but with the administration costs of a thin client.”
Speaking of thin clients, they are certainly not a new thing in the Linux
world.
The Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP) is perhaps the “granddaddy” of
all Linux thin-client open source projects and is now being included in the latest Ubuntu
Linux release.
Jim McQuillan, leader of the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), sees
stateless Linux as a competitive project, although, in his estimation, the
thin-client market is going to be plenty big enough for both projects.
That being the case, McQuillan noted that RHEL 4 users need not
necessarily wait until 2006 in order to have thin client functionality in
their distributions.
“In fact, I’ve deployed LTSP on RHEL4 with great success,” McQuillan told
internetnews.com.
From what McQuillan has seen of stateless Linux, it will require
fairly hefty clients. In comparison, he argued that LTSP works with all
kinds of clients, both old and new.
A potential shortcoming of LTSP, though, is that it does not
include a GUI to manage setup.
“But it’s certainly stable enough to connects lots (100’s) of thin
clients to a big server,” McQuillan said. “We’re working on things like
server clustering, to increase scalability.”
LTSP and Red Hat at one point did talk, according to McQuillan. “We talked back in 2001, but at that time, LTSP wasn’t as mature as it is
now, and it wasn’t ready to be included in a distro.”
Times have changed, and, with Ubuntu on board, McQuillan said that he’d
love the opportunity to work with the Redhat/Fedora guys to give them the
same functionality.
“My first thoughts of stateless Linux last year was, ‘If they come up with
some good ideas, we’ll take them and implement in LTSP, and if we come up
with good ideas, they are welcome to them,” McQuillan said. “In the end,
thin clients will be better because of it. I really dislike duplication of effort.”
Beyond stateless Linux and virtualization, Red Hat’s plans for 2006 also
involve helping developers to actually develop. To that end, Red Hat has said
that it will continue to invest in Eclipse, as well as in its own SystemTAP
project, which is currently in development via the Fedora Project.
According to its project page, “the SystemTap project aims to produce a
Linux tool that lets application developers and system administrators take a
deeper look into a running kernel.”
Red Hat will also continue to develop developer-focused content, training
and certifications.
“Some of our largest customers are beginning to realize that a
combination of open source development tools and distributed development
processes, mirroring how the open source community operates, are yielding
significant increases in software quality, even while decreasing
time-to-market,” Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering
at Red Hat, said in a statement. “Our experience with distributed software
development ideally positions us to help customers win in this new
environment.”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL) was released in
February of this year. The product follows an 18-month development cycle,
placing a RHEL 5 release sometime in the second half of 2006.
