Red Hat Server Edition 6: Long Life Cycle With Lots to Like

Red Hat Enterprise 6 (aka Santiago) was released Nov. 10, 2010 -- 3.5 years after the first release of RHEL 5 and 7 months after RHEL 5.5. It will be supported to at least some extent for another 10 years (until Nov. 30, 2020), which is a pretty impressive life cycle, especially compared to the 5-year support of Ubuntu's LTS releases. It's just one confirmation of the intended market for RHEL6, which is clear throughout the release specs.

Some of the basics: The supplied kernel is 2.6.32, and the new default filesystem is ext4 (much faster than ext3, and scales to 16TB). Other filesystem add-ons available include XFS (scalable to 100TB) and the clustered GFS2 filesystem. NFSv4 and Fuse are also included.

Red Hat's big focus in this release has been on scalability and flexibility, supporting physical, virtual and cloud systems. There's a stack of cluster support options, based around the Corosync Cluster Engine, and including Conga (Red Hat's cluster management software), and virtualization options. The kernel's been improved to spend more time idle, which reduces power usage -- great for the power bills of big organizations, not to mention the planet. RHEL6 can support up to 64 virtualized CPUs per guest using KVM (which comes with the release; Xen doesn't); and on hardware, up to 4,096 CPUs.

Red Hat is clearly thinking about what might happen during that theoretical 10-year life cycle.