Thushan Fernando Uncut

CentOS 5.4 has been released! Woo yeah, its been a while since RHEL 5.4 has been out but checkout the release notes for a list of changes.

Download mirrors are being updated but if your local, here are a couple of Australian Mirrors.

CentOS 5.4 x86

• iinet – http://ftp.iinet.net.au/pub/centos/5.4/isos/i386
• internode  – http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/centos/5.4/isos/i386/

CentOS 5.4 x64

• iinet – http://ftp.iinet.net.au/pub/centos/5.4/isos/x86_64
• internode – http://mirror.internode.on.net/pub/centos/5.4/isos/x86_64/

I just did a inplace 5.3->5.4 upgrade with a yum update. With a localised mirror, blindingly fast too!

If you haven’t heard already, Redhat has released the eagerly anticipated 5.4 release of Redhat Enterprise Linux at their Redhat Summit in Chicago. As expected, Redhat looks to have moved from using Xen as their favoured virtualisation hypervisor to using KVM (which is an integral part of the Linux Kernel). All this will eventually go into RHEV.

All the changes in this release are documented in the  Release Notes, unfortunately Ext4 is still not considered usable in this release (they’re targetting for RHEL6 possibly).

So what of the RHEL clone CentOS? Possibly a 2-4 week delay it seems. WOO! In the meantime, upgrading from 5.3 is easy peasy.

Oracle Corporation

Sun Microsystems

In what may come as a suprise to everyone, Oracle Corporation has bought Sun MicroSystems for a cool $7.4Billion benjamins. IBM was eying a buyout for quite sometime but (I reckons for the better of mankind) has failed to secure the epic deal.

Question is, what will happen to the buyouts such as VirtualBox (Oracle has a hypervisor which launched in 2007 and is based on the Xen Hypervisor), MySQL which was acquired by Sun a while ago (Oracle has this little RDBMS called Oracle btw), OpenOffice which will have another O  added to it (oooo  its OOo).

On the brighter side though, Oracle did kick off in 2007 the upcoming Btrfs filesystem and with Sun messing about with CDDL and patents in ZFS, maybe we can finally get something happenning to push ZFS into Linux?

Then theres the future of Java, DTrace, oh gosh so so many questions, so many unknowns. I guess we’ll have to follow the white rabbit and see how things goes Neo.

A quick note before I head to bed tonight, Citrix has decided to give away its OSS XenSource virtualisation platform for free…

If you’re reading this, you already know the news: XenServer, our enterprise virtual infrastructure platform is now free (including resource pooling and live relo), and we have announced Citrix Essentials for XenServer, and Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V as our virtualization management portfolio that offers a rich set of automated functions that drive the compatible virtualization layers beneath – the free Hyper-V hypervisor from Microsoft, and the free XenServer Enterprise virtual infrastructure platform from Citrix.  Finally, and most importanly, we announced a powerful go-to-market roadmap with Microsoft.

The eqivalent of Citrix’s XenMotion – which can migrate a live virtual machine to any other XenServer host running in the same resource pool without downtime – in the VMWare world is a pretty $4-6K investment. Not a bad move considering VMWare is about to do its VMWorld Europe 2009 show soon.

From the product site, a direct comparison:

Features included at no cost	Citrix XenServer	VMware ESXi
Bare-metal hypervisor	64-bit	32-bit
Max virtual CPUs	8	4
Windows® and Linux guests
Unlimited servers, VMs, memory
P2V & V2V conversion
Shared SAN and NAS storage
Centralized multi-server management
Resilient distributed management architecture
Live motion
Shared VM template library
Centralized configuration management
Virtual infrastructure patch management
Intelligent initial VM placement
Intelligent server maintenance mode
Fine-grained CPU resource controls
Hot-swappable disks and NICs

Virualization.info has an interesting look at the move and what it may mean. Otherwise, go grab your copy.

Direct download links appear below:

Base Installer [296Mb] (MD5)
Linux Guest Support Installer [245Mb] (MD5)
XenCenter for Windows [6Mb] (MD5)

Enjoy!