virtualization.info

After more less than 4 months since opening of the beta program, Red Hat is ready to launch its new Enterprise Linux 5.1.

This release introduces several improvements in virtualization, including:

• Adoption of Xen 3.1
• Support for Itanium 2 architectures (both hardware-assisted and para virtualization)
• Support for live migration of hardware-assisted virtualization guest OSes

Release Notes don't mention which version of Virtual Machine Manager (aka virt-manager) RHEL 5.1 is including. The beta version used to sport version 0.2.0, while current version is 0.5.1.

With this release Red Hat also introduces support for Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), allowing online bookstore customers to use RHEL 5.1 guest OSes on demand. It will be a major test to verify if the Red Hat implementation of Xen is ready for prime time.