CAT | Linux
For anyone else googling trying to find the answer to this, as I was today, I refer you to the following Red Hat article:
To paraphrase, the solution is to take the RAID card out the server and throw it in the bin. The S300 isn’t a real RAID card, it’s a fakeraid. You’re better off just using Linux software RAID.
Unfortunately, the cabling in the server doesn’t allow for connecting to the on-board SATA ports, or rather for powering them. Speaking to Dell support, they initially suggested that just disabling the card in the BIOS would be sufficient; they later admitted it isn’t, and offered to send out suitable cables.
I seem to remember Dell making a big deal of their entire server line offering full Linux support some time ago, so I’m surprised to see them making this retrograde step – particularly as Linux represents a large percentage of the server market. In Dell’s defence they do make it reasonably clear that the S300 card isn’t supported under Linux at the ordering stage.
As I keep getting asked by customers when they can expect Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, I thought it was worthwhile to make a post on the subject. This is a reasonably long post, but the simple answer to the question is that I don’t know, but my educated guess would be Q4 2010, and that we’ll have a firm(er) date by the end of June. Please note that I’m not a Red Hat employee, although my company is a Red Hat partner, and that nothing in this post is official in any way, shape or form.
Red Hat Enterprise releases have been traditionally 18-24 months apart, and on that basis one might have expected RHEL6 to have been released sometime between October 2008 and March 2009, as RHEL5 was released in March of 2007. So what’s taking Red Hat so long, and when can we expect RHEL6?
There are a number of reasons for the delay, but the biggest is related to the Fedora Project, who create Fedora, on which Red Hat Enterprise is based.
For Fedora releases up to version 6, on which RHEL5 was based, the Fedora Project was run very much as an in-house Red Hat project, with contributions from the wider Open Source community. Post FC6, the Fedora Project was much more run by the Open Source community, with Red Hat contributors. This seems to have led to a shift in focus from fixing bugs to implementing new features. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing – Fedora exists to be the ‘bleeding edge’ of development, pushing at the boundaries in a way Red Hat are obviously unable to do with an enterprise focussed product like RHEL. Unfortunately, Fedora 9, on which RHEL6 was to be based, released with a large number of critical bugs and stability issues. Red Hat made the decision that they therefore couldn’t base RHEL6 on this release, and instead poured man-power into the Fedora Project, fixing bugs and generally improving stability as much as possible.
The evidence is that RHEL6 will now be based on Fedora 12, which was released in November of last year. The was a gap of just under a year between Fedora 6 and RHEL5, so this would point to a release in Autumn of this year.
The other issue that has caused delays to RHEL is that of virtualisation. RHEL4/RHEL5 utilised the Xen hypervisor for their virtualisation. In September 2008 Red Hat purchased Qumranet, whose staff included the leaders of the KVM project, an alternate virtualisation technology. KVM is very much seen as the future for Linux virtualisation, and Red Hat immediately made it clear that this was the direction they would be pursuing. RHEL 5.4 included KVM as a ‘technology preview’, so clearly much progress has been made integrating it into the main Red Hat release. It’s therefore likely that this is no longer holding up RHEL6.
I expect the final release date for RHEL6 to be announced at the Red Hat summit at the end of June. There have been some suggestions that RHEL6 itself will be released at the summit. Unless Red Hat release a beta within the next couple of weeks, I’d say this looks distinctly unlikely.
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Want to cut your IT budget without cutting services? Switch to Linux
0 Comments | Posted by sam in Links, Linux
For obvious reasons everyone is looking to make cost savings at the moment, and for inspiration you can look to the French Gendarmerie, who have saved millions of Euros as part of a transition to Linux.
“A report published by the European Commission’s Open Source Observatory provides some details from a recent presentation given by Gendarmerie Lieutenant-Colonel Xavier Guimard, who says that the Gendarmerie has been able to reduced its annual IT budget by 70 percent without having to reduce its capabilities.”
Read the full story over at Ars Technica.
One often overlooked issue with regards to calculating the total cost of ownership for an OS: power consumption.
These figures from http://mjg59.livejournal.com/103511.html:
- Idle power draw of Fedora 10: 100W
- Idle power draw of Opensolaris 2008-11: 135W
A bit late to the party with this one, as he started whilst I was on holiday, but Linux create Linus Torvalds has started his own blog.
It’s interestingly entitled ‘Torvalds Family Blog’, although Linus being Linus I’m sure we’ll see some excellent highly controversial non-family posts, just like his mailing list postings.
