I didn’t even notice it, as The Register put it, it was a very quiet launch. While I have been using Debian on my home systems for more than twelve years now, I do much prefer to use Red Hat Enterprise at work.
And RHEL 6 looks like a pretty decent upgrade
- Significantly improved power management (aka lower cpu usage for idle VMs) – hello higher consolidation ratios
- Hot add CPU and memory (wish there was hot remove – if there is I don’t see it mentioned)
- 85% increase in number of packages in the distribution – yay, maybe there will be a lot less things I will have to compile on my own
Sorry I still can’t help but laugh at the scalability claims
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has been designed to deliver performance and scalability without sacrificing data integrity. It allows scaling to 4,096 CPUs and 64 terabytes of RAM, providing a solid foundation for supporting upcoming generations of hardware.
It is interesting that the max file system size for the ext4 file system is the same as ext3 – 16TB. Seems kind of dinky.
XFS goes to 100TB which also seems small, maybe just “tested” limits, I would expect XFS to scale far higher than that given it’s SGI heritage. The XFS documentation says for 64-bit Linux you can go to 18 Exabytes, which I think is just as crazy as Red Hat’s CPU claims but as long as you can safely do a few hundred TB that is more than enough for these days I think.
I can’t imagine anyone committing a petabyte or more to a single file system for a good long while at least.
I’ll let others play with KVM until at least RHEL 7, until then it’s VMware for me.
ext4 actually supports filesystems up to 1 EB. But the current e2fsprogs still has the 16TB limit baked in, so you can’t actually to a mkfs on anything larger than that. I do wish they’d get that fixed though. Now RHEL supports xfs I’ve migrated a few large volumes from ext3 to xfs because of that limit.
Comment by Gavin Carr — November 12, 2010 @ 6:04 am
good to know, thanks!!
Comment by Nate — November 12, 2010 @ 8:57 am
Just out of curiosity, why no kvm until thel7?
Comment by scott mccarty — August 28, 2011 @ 10:22 pm