Open source firm Red Hat has released fifth update to its Enterprise Linux 5 platform, adding features designed to operate across physical, virtual and cloud deployments.
The new update also offers enhanced virtualisation and interoperability capabilities as well as bug fixes in addition to interoperability with new platforms from Red Hat partners including AMD, Dell, HP, IBM and Intel.
According to Red Hat, the newly supported platforms include Intel Nehalem EX, AMD Opteron 6000 Series and IBM Power 7, allowing the company’s customers to take advantage of some of the industry’s powerful new servers.
Red Hat said that the support for the large memory systems of new servers allows a larger number of virtual machines to be deployed on each physical server. Huge page support is also now automatic and extended to virtual guests, improving the performance of memory-intensive applications, while the support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) offers virtual guests an improved ability to share PCI hardware resources and efficient access I/O devices.
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In addition, the Enterprise Linux 5.5 also offers Microsoft Windows 7 interoperability enhancements and extends Active Directory integration for improved user and group mapping, while simplifying filesystem management across platforms, Red Hat said.
Tim Burke, vice president of engineering at Red Hat, said:“We believe that Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to drive the evolution of the operating platform forward with new technology that delivers performance, reliability, scalability and affordability results for our customers.
“Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a powerful foundation for physical, virtual and cloud deployments, and for many, continues to be the platform of choice for their most demanding mission-critical workloads.”
