Submitted by Martin V, 5 April, 2010 - 16:06

A few days ago Red Hat announced RHEL 5 update 5 availability with very interesting news and enhancements. In this article I will pick up my favourite ones.

News in RHEL OS Base:

• now supporting new procesor family Intel Boxboro-EX and Boxboro-MC, and also AMD's new processor family Magny-Cours and IBM Power7.
• enhancements in Anaconda (RHEL installer) for installations over NFS. Kickstarts can be fetched of FTP server with user credentials.
• production support of SAMBA3x. Now supporting Microsoft® Windows™ 7, Windows 2008 R2 connection enhancements.
• new FreeRADIUS, version 2.
• PostgreSQL version 8.4.
• enhanced PCI pass-through for XEN and KVM.
• driver update and new support for 10Gbit NICs.

Highlights of news in Red Hat Cluster Suite:

• RH Cluster Suite now supports SELinux in enforcing mode.
• production support of KVM guests configured as HA services in RH Cluster Suite.
• GFS2 now supports new configuration options (errors=withdraw and errors=panic).
• fence_ipmi now supports power "cycle".

What's new in Technology preview:

• ext4, production support most likely in RHEL6.
• fence_virsh, currently without RH Cluster Suite support.
• SystemTap can be run as non-root user.
• eCryptfs looks nice, can we it be used as replacement for cryptsetup a Luks in the future?
• Software based Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). Already with production support for Cisco fnic driver, Emulex lpfc driver, and Qlogic qla2xx driver.

Red Hat continues it's journey to deliver one of the best Operating System for datacenters around the world.

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