“In the new version 6 of its flagship product, Red Hat has
incorporated many technological developments of the past few years.
Compared to its predecessor, this release of Red Hat Enterprise
Linux therefore contains a large number of changes.“Enterprise distributions of Linux have different requirements
than community distributions: not frequent releases, but long-term
support and stable, mature technologies are what’s needed. While
Fedora, Ubuntu and similar distributions release new versions every
six months to bring technological advancements to the desktops of
Linux fans, Red Hat has allowed three-and-a-half years for the
development of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The new version is a
major leap forward for Red Hat’s main product and offers numerous
advancements.“Virtualisation
“In terms of virtualisation, Red Hat now relies exclusively on
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) as its hypervisor. With this
decision, the company has moved one step closer to its long-term
goal of saying good-bye to Xen, which was the preferred
virtualisation component when RHEL 5 was introduced in March 2007.
In 2009, KVM was added as a second hypervisor to RHEL 5.4 after Red
Hat took over Qumranet, the company behind KVM. However, Red Hat
will continue to support Xen within series 5, which will be
maintained at least until 2014.”