Red Hat improves management and virtualisation with Enterprise Linux 5.7

Red Hat has released an update for customers running its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform which adds features from the newer Enterprise Linux 6 as well as security and stability enhancements.

Available now, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 has been in beta since May and contains a number of enhancements for enterprise management, virtualisation performance and datacentre flexibility, the firm said.

Included in these are some features introduced with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 in May, such as Subscription Manager, which have been selectively back-ported to the older platform.

Subscription Manager is a new tool for tracking updates to the operating system, applications and services, for better availability and faster updates.

Other improvements include better migration performance for virtual machines operating under KVM, and performance and scalability enhancements to the Xen hypervisor.

Red Hat has also added support for the Security Content Automation Protocol, and updated drivers to allow this version of Enterprise Linux to make full use of newer hardware including the latest chips from Intel and AMD.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was released back in 2007, but the firm offers support for its enterprise-grade platform on a seven-year lifecycle, with options to extend this up to 10 years.

Separately, Linux founder Linus Torvalds has announced on his Google+ account that the latest version of Linux has finally launched.

Some 20 years after the kernel was first authored, Linux 3.0 has been dubbed a minor update.