Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta 1

RHEL6 Beta 1 was publicly released last week and the files on the FTP server are dated April 14th.

You can fill out an optional survey and then be provided with the download links. The Beta Release Notes are full of all the changes.

As I speculated, much of RHEL6 major versions are based on Fedora 12 or updates that have come out since.

There are also many Optional packages available that are not on the install DVD which you may want to download if you want to keep an offline set of RHEL6Beta1 install/test media.

Brand new news today is a webinar for RedHat's Enterprise Virtualization product on May 13th. I'm curious to see how they compete in the VMWare-dominated market, and if it would be worth looking at instead of VirtualBox as I use now. If nothing else, when RHEL6 ships I will be seriously looking at moving over to KVM, which is a core technology that RHEV uses.

The only downside is that KVM requires VT processors (?), and the servers I own presently are older generation hand-me-downs that run just fine w/o VT, and therefore won't support KVM. It's been a long time since I bought a server (only 1 time ever), and I'm not going to do so just to get VT support to run KVM. I have one Xeon server with 5GB of RAM running 4 VMs with VirtualBox just fine right now, idling 90%+ of the time, and really only using half of the RAM, but it's all there so I give it to the VMs which use it for disk caching.

Eventually I'll have some customers who can kick down some newer servers with VT-capable processors (*wink* *wink*), but many of my customers are government and pseudo-government agencies, and have to send all old hardware off to be auctioned. I'd rather have older servers, with redundant RAIDed hard drives and dual power supplies, than something newer but not as hardy (as the one "server" clone I bought was).