The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Ideas discussion group provides a venue for sharing thoughts and use cases and will be used by the Red Hat engineering development groups.

“We welcome all of our customers and partners to participate in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Ideas group and collaborate with other users and Red Hat engineering to make the next version of our enterprise operating system better than ever,” said Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platform Business Unit at Red Hat in a statement.

What do you think of this idea? Do you feel like it will be useful for you to have a way to give direct feedback on the next iteration of RHEL? What do you want to see in the next version?

Also, we’re seeking system admins who are currently using RHEL 6 to give us feedback on the latest released version of the operating system. Please email nmartin@techtarget.com if you would be willing to share your experience.

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 And it’s not just any Windows Server. To run the current RHEV management, users must get Windows Server 2008, R2. “You need the latest and greatest,” said an IT manager with a big Linux-oriented systems integration firm. No admins want to work with two sets of tools, said another attendee.

Face it, Linux shops have Linux skills and many want absolutely nothing to do with Windows. Full stop. They barely tolerate the sound of Windows boot-up music emanating from reporters’ laptops.

The odd Windows console requirement is a remnant of Red Hat’s acquisition of Qumranet, and its KVM virtualization expertise but it’s nearly over. The Windows-less RHEV 3.0 is due later this year.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

1: Red Hat is pitching itself hard as the “open” cloud player. It’s new CloudForms Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering promises to let users (buzzword alert) “leverage” existing technologies–virtual servers from Red Hat or VMware, public clouds by Amazon, IBM, and others; and on-premises or hosted physical servers.

Then there’s Red Hat OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) which, Red Hat said, will support Java, Python,  PHP and Ruby languages and Spring, Seam, Weld, CDI, Rails, Zend, Django, Java EE and other frameworks.

Isaac Roth, Red Hat’s PaaS Master, said developers just want to develop. Figuring out infrastructure, platform basics, servers, and fundamentals is not how developers should be spending their time. 

“God it’s awful,” Roth told reporters on Wednesday. “I just want to write Angry Birds.”  His claim is that OpenShift Express will ease their pain.

OpenShift Express, a free set of client development tools, is available now. Two other, higher-end versions, OpenShift Flex and OpenShift Power add more capabilities.

2: Last year, Summit attendees were busy weighing Red Hat’s Xen-for-KVM virtualization switch and what issues they might experience in a Xen-to-KVM migration of their own. Flash forward to this year, Red Hat appears to embrace the idea of multiple hypervisors. It must be that whole “openness” thing. VMware doesn’t share that philosophy, according to Red Hat exec VP Paul Cormier who charged that VMware  ”is trying to take the entire world back to the 1980s by locking you into the hardware level with ESX.”

3: Perhaps Red Hat is getting all kumbaya about virtualization because it has no choice. Judging from another Summit session, there’s a heckuva a lot RHEL shops running (gasp!) VMware. Even RHEL shops that would love to go with Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) aren’t gonna go there until they no longer have to run RHEV management on a Windows (yes, Windows!) server. That hated Windows requirement will finally go away with the upcoming RHEV 3 release.

4: Judging from the packed session on running high-availability Oracle databases on RHEL, Oracle’s efforts to supplant RHEL with Oracle Unbreakable Linux are falling woefully short.

5: Opinions on Red Hat support remain mixed. Some RHEL customers  privately say companies deploy RHEL because they have to prove they’re running a supported OS. But the problem is, when they actually call for support, the results are wildly inconsistent. Two Summit attendees — who work for different government agencies — said they are very happy with RHEL support, although they both also noted that they never, ever use it. Many techie-heavy Linux shops may be in the same boat. (If a support call is never dialed, does support really happen?)

Here’s more cloud news from Red Hat Summit/JBoss World.

Let us know what you think about the story; email Barbara Darrow, Senior News Director at bdarrow@techtarget.com.

Overall fixes in RHEL 5.6 number approximately 2,000, and there are 340 individual enhancements. Some of the security enhancements include updated Domain Name Service (DNS) packages – RHEL 5.6 improves the cryptographic signatures that are good for high-security installations such as in government organizations.

There is also now support for sVirt (SELinux virtualization), which allows Mandatory Access Control (MAC) profiles to be applied to virtual guests, enhancing the system’s security. In addition, ebtables, a Layer 2 firewall application, is introduced in RHEL 5.6. With this application, those using RHEL for large virtualized deployments can securely partition guest traffic with the application while configuring using multiple software bridges within RHEL.

Security enhancements aside, there is also a wealth of other improvements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.6, including support for new processors and chipsets. RHEL 5 will continue to be updated until 2014 by Red Hat. For more on the update, check out SearchDataCenter.com’s news brief and Red Hat’s blog.

Virtual desktop, remote administration and cloud features
I put out a request for feedback on Twitter, and Dan, a Linux user, responded that he hadn’t tried Fedora 14 yet, “but after reading the article about virtualization and cloud stuff built into it, I want to try it.”

For virtual desktop users, the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environment (SPICE) is included, bringing “thin client” computing to life. SPICE can be used to connect to remote or local QEMU virtual machine instances, and handles 2D graphics acceleration, audio, and video streaming. A 64-bit software environment is recommended for the host, but the client can be either x86 or x86-64. The inclusion of SPICE is a good preview of desktop virtualization capabilities coming in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2.

For those interested in test-driving the features of Fedora 14, it is available on Amazon’s EC2. Until now, the most recent version of Fedora on EC2 was version 8.

Remote administration is enhanced with Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) via ipmiutil. For servers containing hardware with IPMI support, remotely management and administration is made easier with ipmiutil’s capabilities, which include features like Serial-over-LAN and identity LED manipulation.

JPEG handling, system admin, and developer features
Fedora 14 also features libjpegturbo, which offers significant time-savings for users when working with jpeg files. The developers say that the library “practically halves processing time on most systems,” and even older hardware users will see a boost.

For system admins a tech preview of systemd, a replacement for a Upstart and System V init, is included.

For developers, the GNU debugger, GDB is included and has been made more efficient by automatically generating the indexes it needs in advance in the debuginfo packages. Python 2.7 is included with increased efficiency in modules, some of which are now feature complete with their Python 3.1 equivalents. For Perl devs, Rakudo Star, a Parrot virtual-machine-based implementation of Perl 6 is included. Also, the D programming language is available.

Fedora 14 ships with GNOME 2.32, a transitional GNOME release. KDE 4.5, released in August, is also available in Fedora 14 with a new notification system and preliminary support for tiling in the KWin window manager.

Ron McCarty, founder and Director of Professional Services at Your Net Guard, shared his interest in OpenSCAP and Varnish Web caching server support.

A complete list of the features included in Fedora 14 shows that I’ve only shared the highlights here. We’d like to hear what your favorite features are, please leave your comments below.

For a first-hand look into Fedora 14, you can read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols review from ITworld, which gives a good idea of the release and reports some minor problems.

Total revenue for the quarter was $219.8 million, which was up 20% from the year ago quarter at $183.6 million, while subscription revenue for Q2 was up 19% to $186.2 from last year. Red Hat President and CEO Jim Whitehurst cited Red Hat’s cloud computing and virtualization efforts among the reasons for the solid growth for the company, including a private cloud management deal worth over $1 million. Whitehurst also looked at cross-selling of products, strong renewals and new project spending as reasons for the revenue increase.

You can check out the full earnings release with balance sheets and a full earnings report.

The official company press release says that Beta 2 includes “an updated installer, additional new technologies and resolutions to many of the issues that were reported in the initial Beta.”

There are still many known issues with the Beta 2 version, and it’s hard to quickly ascertain in the release notes what new improvements have been made.

One thing that caught my attention was the improved Samba support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Beta provides the following significant enhancements to Samba:

• Internet Protocol version 6 support (IPv6)
• Support for Windows 2008 (R2) trust relationships.
• Support for Windows 7 domain members.
• Support for Active Directory LDAP signing/sealing policy.
• Improvements for libsmbclient
• Better support for Windows management tools (mmc and User Manager)
• Automatic machine password changes as domain member
• New registry based configuration layer
• Encrypted SMB transport between Samba client and server
• Full support for Windows cross-forest, transitive trusts and one-way domain trusts
• New NetApi remote management and winbind client C libraries
• A new graphical user interface for joining Windows Domains

If you’ve been playing with the RHEL 6 beta, what are your favorite new features and what do you wish was there?

I spoke with Tim Burke, Vice President of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, and he filled me in on some of the details. Red Hat also has posted a blog with extensive product specs for RHEL 6 on their website.

Completely fair scheduler
A couple of weaknesses in Linux that were discussed with the Linux kernel panel at the recent Linux Collaboration Summit are addressed by RHEL 6. At the top of the list is the completely fair scheduler (CFS), with better “awareness” of the hardware topology, which Burke said is increasingly important in today’s systems.

“For systems like Intel’s Nehalem-EX, different pieces of memory are closely associated with different cores,” said Burke. “The cost of memory access is not uniform. [With CFS] I/O devices can be more efficiently accessed by the processor most local to it. It is better able to assign workloads to the optimal set of processors.”

This improved scheduler has been shared upstream, and is now part of the Linux development tree.

“We continue to perform work on improving latency in I/O stack,” said Burke. “We will drive that innovation upstream.”

Huge pages
Transparent huge pages are one of the virtualization improvements in RHEL 6 beta. The huge pages are a way of more efficiently mapping large regions of memory that can be used by applications, said Burke, who said that they have produced up to 20% performance enhancement in some systems.

“Virtual management registers page table entries and maps to a block of memory (4,096),” said Burke. “Memory that is mapping a virtualized guest could easily be 256 GB, so to manage that in 4,096 KB pages can be inefficient. But when you use huge pages, each page table can map up to 2 GB of physical memory.”

Huge pages themselves aren’t new, but in RHEL 5, the system administrator would have to reserve chunks of memory to use huge pages, said Burke.

“In RHEL 6 is ability to automatically manage huge pages, without the system admin having to reserve memory,” said Burke. “It automatically allocates large memory pages for any app that requests large memory allocation. It obviates having to alter application.”

To download the beta and begin testing it out, you can visit the RHEL 6 beta page on Red Hat’s website.

The RHEL 5.5 update provides a number of virtualization enhancements, and the support for new servers with large memory systems allows a larger number of virtual machines to be deployed on each physical server. Huge page support is now automatic and extended to virtual guests, improving the performance of memory-intensive applications. Support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) offers virtual guests an improved ability to share PCI hardware resources and more efficient access I/O devices, and according to Red Hat, further I/O optimizations can help improve flexibility when migrating virtual guests across physical systems.

Tim Burke, vice president of platform engineering at Red Hat, shared some of the update specifics with The Register. Burke said that in RHEL 5.5 the operating system is more aware of the system topology and instruction streams and data are now physically close because of the memory allocation and job scheduling changes. More work is also placed on as few cores as possible due to kernel changes, which allows servers to conserve power.

RHEL 6 availability will be announced in June, and a beta of RHEL 6 should be available later in April according to a statement by Burke.

• Windows 7 as “Linux killer”? How times have changed!
• Windows 7: Microsoft’s Linux killer?
• Windows 7 The Linux killer and Ubuntu Going Mainstream

Linux was thought to be a player in the netbook business, but a Spring 2009 NPD Group study shows that Windows has a 90% share of the netbook OS market. It seems silly to be talking about any Windows desktop operating system as a Linux killer. There are so few Linux client operating systems deployed compared to Windows that this discussion is off target, especially because it appears that Windows 7 is an improvement over Windows Vista.

Today, about 25 or 26 paid Windows client operating systems are shipped for each paid Linux client shipped, according to IDC. Paid Windows client operating systems have more than 90% market share while Mac and Linux make up most of the remaining share. The market share lead that Windows has over Linux is not expected to change much for the foreseeable future.

There are about 30 times as many paid Windows client operating systems in use as there are paid Linux client operating systems deployed. And there are about 13 times as many non-paid Windows client operating systems in use as there are non-paid Linux clients.

Non-paid Linux client shipments are growing faster than paid Linux client shipments while paid Windows client shipments are growing faster than non-paid Windows client shipments. These two trends are also true for Linux and Windows installed bases. Any notion that Linux client operating systems are cutting into Windows’ client dominant market share is ill-founded.

Windows 7 Business, scheduled to ship in October 2009, is expected to be the best Windows client operating system ever. According to IDC, Windows 7 Business will overtake shipments of Vista Business by the end of 2010. Windows XP Professional, Vista’s client predecessor, is also expected to give way to Windows 7 Business by the end of next year.

A unified Linux desktop
So if Linux has any chance of cutting into Windows client’s market share, which flavor of Linux will it be?

Today, the leading Linux client operating system vendor is Red Flag followed by Turbolinux, according to IDC. Ubuntu Desktop has more paid Linux client market share than does Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Desktop or Novell’s SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED). Red Flag also leads in non-paid Linux client shipments with Ubuntu Desktop in second place. RHEL Desktop and SLED have larger shares of the non-paid Linux client shipments than they do of paid Linux client shipments. This is also true for Ubuntu.

Ubuntu Desktop is by far the fastest growing Linux client operating system for both paid Linux and non-paid Linux client shipments with three to four times the growth rate of either SLED or RHEL Desktop. With respect to non-paid Linux, Ubuntu Desktop’s market share growth rate is about four to six times the growth rate for SLED and RHEL Desktop. If Ubuntu Desktop continues to grow anywhere nearly as fast as it has grown in the past year, it will shortly be the leading paid and non-paid Linux client operating system in the world.

Ubuntu Desktop got a boost recently when IBM and Canonical launched Linux and cloud-based desktop software in the U.S. The software package, IBM Client for Smart Work, delivers productivity and collaboration software with a savings of up to 50% per seat on software costs versus a Windows-based desktop. The software includes word processing, spreadsheets, etc. from IBM Lotus Symphony; email from IBM Lotus Notes; and cloud-based tools from LotusLive.com

It is not clear whether Ubuntu Desktop can make a dent in Windows client operating system market share, but it is clear that Novell and Red Hat have not been successful and likely will not be successful. Linux vendors have been using security, TCO, and usability as the primary reasons that you should switch from Windows to Linux clients. Security is no longer a differentiator nor is usability, especially with Windows 7. And TCO is a weak argument without application availability. Many of the applications that we take for granted on Windows client operating systems are not available on Linux.

Novell tries to make a strong case for SLED over Windows Vista in a paper titled Lower Your TCO with SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop (PDF) citing lower TCO, better security, better productivity, etc. Red Hat pushes RHEL Desktop with its enterprise customers. The real hang-ups for Linux client operating systems are lack of applications and the cost/pain of moving from Windows to Linux.

I believe that the only way Linux clients can make a dent in Windows client operating systems’ market share is if the Linux vendors adopt a single Linux client operating system, such as Ubuntu Desktop (with a name change), and market and sell it against Windows. Commercial Linux vendors use the same code base for their Linux client operating systems as they use for their Linux server operating systems, but create separate DVDs for the bits. Even if we consider that cost saving practice, Linux vendors would save considerable engineering/marketing costs by collectively developing and selling a single Linux client operating system.

The open source community has gotten behind Firefox, and its market share has grown from 3.6% in 2004 to more than 20% in 2009. This could also happen to the Ubuntu client operating system with Linux community support. If Ubuntu client could garner 10% of the client operating system market by 2014, over 25 million copies of Ubuntu client would be sold, giving Linux client the volume that it needs to generate serious revenue and placing it on track to become a real competitor to Windows. At $5 per subscription, Ubuntu client would generate $125 million in 2014. Today, the average selling price of Linux client is under $10.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bill Claybrook is President of New River Marketing Research, a marketing research firm that focuses on Linux, open source software, and commercial grid computing.