RHEL 5 Server OS

The latest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server boasts of many

interesting features. It comes in three different flavors but Red Hat doesn't

ship them separately. There's a single set of CDs for it and another one for

desktops. During installation you have to choose what flavor of Red Hat

Enterprise Linux you would want to install. Like other open source OS distros,

RHEL has also upgraded its kernel version to 2.6.18, to include support for

IPv6, shared cache and multi-core systems. Also RHEL 5 includes troubleshooting

tools for SELinux, which is a GUI based analyzer to help you take action in case

of a security alert.

Key highlights



First is the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advance Platform, targeted toward

large enterprises and that supports servers of all sizes. It also supports

unlimited virtual guests and storage virtualization. It is packaged as an

integrated solution for enterprises, which includes server and storage

virtualization technology in a single product. Apart from virtualization

technologies this flavor provides you management capabilities such as virt-manager

which allows you to manage all virtual machines running on the system, Libvirt,

which is a C toolkit or an API for managing virtual machines. The two features

are also given with the second flavor but the difference is that here they have

provided a conga cluster/storage GUI for managing storage and clusters. This

particular flavor of RHEL 5 also includes the Red Hat Cluster Suite which

provides you with failover capabilities, so that an application can be moved

between two guest OSes or on between two different physical systems, within

minutes in case of system failure. The second flavor is Red Hat Enterprise

Linux, which is targeted at small deployments, especially places where a server

is focused on a single application. For example, the server could be a web

server or a mail server. It can supports upto 2 processor sockets and a max of

four virtual guests. The third one, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop is a

full fledged desktop operating system similar to other open source Linux

operating systems. It includes applications that are suitable for office users.

Like other open source distros, it also features a 3D desktop and has support

for virtualization for up to four guests.

Bottomline: An ideal operating system for client

and server machines in large enterprises.

In Fedora 8, SELinux and Firewall configuration tools are separate. The same is the case with RHEL 5, but here you also have SELinux troubleshooter