Linked by Thom Holwerda on Thu 3rd May 2007 22:30 UTC, submitted by Rahul
Red Hat "Red Hat today released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.5, featuring a 2.6.9-55.EL kernel paravirtualized for i686 and x86_64 machines. RHEL 4.5 also provides NFS performance metrics and updated kernel support for Infiniband connectivity, according to the release announcement."
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RE[2]: Good move redhat
by wibbit on Fri 4th May 2007 10:47 UTC in reply to "RE: Good move redhat"
wibbit
Member since:
2006-03-22

Redhat couldn't have made a much smarter move than updating RHEL4 with a paravirtualized kernel. This will allow businesses using RHEL4 to seamlessly upgrade to RHEL5 by hosting RHEL4 virtual machines under RHEL5.

Erm, no. You could always run RHEL 4.4 as a virtual machine under RHEL5, the virtualised kernel means you could run RHEL5 as a virtual machine under RHEL4.5

4.5 is really so people who have a real need to stick to RHEL4 can gain some features of RHEL5.



My understanding is that, although you could run RHEL 4.x within a fully virtualized environment, it was not possible to run it within a paravertualized environment.

Paravirtualization comes with numerous advantages, including but not limited to.
1) Significant speed boost (at least that's my understanding).
2) Support for giving dedicated access to specific hardware (e.g. network cards)

With RHEL 4.5, it is now possible to run it within a paravirtualized environment, as such taking advantage of the above to features and what ever else comes with para-virtualization.

So now admins can look to set up RHEL 5 virtualization infrastructure and migrate RHEL 4.x servers across by upgrading to 4.5 and installing the required xen modules.

re-write to try and make more sense

Edited 2007-05-04 10:55

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