Commercial Linux distributor, Red Hat has decided to wheel out the next version of its Linux product on February 28, 2007, debuting virtualisation technology.
In November 2006, Red Hat put out the second beta release of its upcoming Enterprise Linux 5 version. With this beta, Red Hat has fully integrated its implementation of the open source Xen hypervisor and the Red Hat Cluster Suite of high availability clustering software. The software is now expected to be generally available in early 2007, not late 2006, the company said in a statement.
The new version's biggest change is the inclusion of Xen virtualisation software, which lets a machine run multiple operating systems simultaneously to increase efficiency. The new version also includes support for quad-core processors, better laptop support, and improvements to the SELinux security software, Red Hat said.
Red Hat is still not talking about what it will charge for RHEL 5, but Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 is certainly keeping the pricing pressure on, with a list price of USD 49 on a machine that spans up to 32 processor sockets and a USD 250 or so street price. It will be interesting to see what Red Hat does for base server license pricing and if it charges for virtualised instances, and the company seemed to be hinting it might earlier this year when it first started talking about RHEL 5. The movement in the market is in the direction of not charging for virtualised servers or charging after a certain number of virtualised instances are installed.
Pund-IT analyst Charles King said, "Making certain that RHEL 5 is thoroughly locked, loaded and debugged before sending it out the door (is) more important in the end than meeting a deadline". And because Red Hat sells software subscriptions, all existing customers get free upgrades, so the company doesn't consider the new version a "revenue event," he added.
"Clearly, the doomsday scenario that some investors feared regarding the entrance of Oracle into the enterprise Linux arena and the ramifications of the Novell-Microsoft partnership did not materialise in the quarter," W.R. Hambrecht analyst Robert Stimson said in a note last week.
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