Tony Iams is no stranger to operating systems. A senior analyst with Ideas International in Port Chester, New York, Iams spends much of his time working with users – and vendors – of the latest operating systems. SearchEnterpriseLinux.com sat down with Iams to discuss the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (RHEL 4). In this interview, Iams talks about some of the new features of RHEL 4 and explains the direction the operating system will take in the future.
Analyst weighs in on the future of Red Hat Enterprise Linux
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or Xen.
The interviewer asks what else is needed to make a secure environment, and the interviewee responds with some tripe about certification. I think he wanted some idea what further real steps were needed, not a sales pitch… Or maybe I read wrong?
I like RHEL4 though, I liked RHEL3 as well; but 4 was definitely worth the upgrade.
is spelled Xen, not Zen.
> is spelled Xen, not Zen.
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,28914…
Can you explain ZEN?
ZEN is an open source virtual machine technology. It’s a little bit different than VMWare, but it gives you the same basic capability of being able to run multiple operating systems on a single server. Now, it’s a little bit different than VMWare because in order for users to be able to host operating systems, they need to modify the operating system that you run in the virtual machine. VMWare, by contrast, just runs standard operating systems. You can just take a box of Windows or a box of Linux and just run it unmodified in a virtual machine. With ZEN you need to have some modifications in the host and the guest operating system.
It’s a typo.
Xen site :
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/index.html
One of the things that they’re emphasizing is the compatibility. That is the ability to run binary applications of earlier versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 2.1 and version 3. RHEL 4 is guaranteed to support the applications from those versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
I didn’t know that, someone revoke my guru license.
>RHEL 4 is guaranteed to support the applications from those versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Thats interesting seeing as how RedHats OWN Cluster software and application software we used on RHEL 3, totally bomb out on RHEL 4. In fact lots of stuff breaks from what I can see because they upgraded python and lots of scripts are not compatibe with the new version.
Certifications that he is talking about are government-regulated standards for ensuring that a system (Computer hardware and software) is secure. NT, Suse Linux, (Trusted) AIX, (Trusted) Solaris all have various levels of security.
Basicly, it is for making sure that your server from harware to OS are configured to meet a certain level of security for mission-critical applications.. Linux + SELinux can be very close to qualifying for a moderately-high level of security.
Hmm. The guy did not even mention the central point of Xen. The point is not to modify guest OS just for fun, but because by this approach, you can get maximum performance in a virtualized environment.