New Release Of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Offers Virtualization Enhancements

The release, the first since RHEL 6.0 began shipping in November, also includes a number of upgrades for upcoming system hardware, as well as security patches and updates, the company said.

"With Linux adoption growing across all workloads, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 provides more enterprise reliability, performance and control throughout the datacenter," said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, platform business at Red Hat, in a statement.

Red Hat continues to expand its product offerings beyond Linux to include a broad range of middleware. And that's fueling sales through the company's channel partners, which the company expects to account for 70 to 75 percent of its sales within two years. But RHEL, which is heavily sold through OEMs, remains the company's flagship product.

Red Hat said the new release promises higher performance than earlier versions when serving as both a virtual machine guest and hypervisor host. The company, for example, said the release delivered record performance on an HP ProLiant BL620c G7, 20-core blade server when tested using SPECvirt_sc2010 benchmarks. It also provided a 45 percent improvement in consolidation when combined with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization running on IBM systems.

RHEL 6.1 offers enhancements in virtualization, file systems, scheduler, resource management and high availability, according to the company, while new technologies promise tighter integration with heterogeneous systems and smoother deployments. And the operating system can better leverage multi-processor servers through improvements to network traffic processing.

The release also includes a technology preview of Red Hat Enterprise Identity services, based on the open-source FreeIPA project, and supports automatic failover for virtual machines and applications using the Red Hat High Availability Add-On.