On November 10th, Red Hat unveiled the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux: version 6. Version 5 was released in March of 2007, so it has been a long road to version 6.
One of the big focuses on RHEL6 is cloud computing. This involves a number of factors, and a lot of work has gone into it to not only make it viable, but highly competitive with other offerings. Performance enhancements abound, making it very efficient and scalable not only for current hardware, but also hardware yet to come For example, systems with 64TB of physical memory and 4096 cores/threads are not typically in use today, but RHEL6 will support it, out of the box, when they are.
While performance is definitely one area of cloud computing, another area is virtualization, and this is where KVM becomes a direct competitor to other virtualization solutions from vendors such as VMware. Using KVM and libvirt, RHEL6 provides a great virtualization management infrastructure with a really powerful virtualization solution — all baked right into the operating system for no extra cost.
Also, RHEL6 now uses the SHA-256 algorithm and a 4096-bit RSA signing key to sign packages. This provides users with greater confidence that packages are legitimate and authentic, compared to the weaker MD5 and SHA-1 algorithms that were used in previous versions. |
