RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0

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With the release of RedHat Enterprise Linux 3.0, RedHat is poised to make an serious dent in the Enterprise space. I spent some time with our technical sales engineer from RedHat last week to talk their latest product offering. There are many improvements in v3.0 that will should help resolve some of the issues people are facing today with AS 2.1.

Some of the major changes/improvements are:

  • Same codebase for all 7 platforms and sold on a annual subscription basis.
  • 12-18 month release cycle and five years of support for every version
  • New threading model from the 2.6 kernel (NPTL) is part of the 3.0 release
  • BlueCurve, the UI from RedHat 9.0 is now part of AS 3.0
  • Increased kernel & user address space for X86 systems. Each process can now use 4.0 GB of RAM instead of 2.3 GB.
  • The new release of Sun JVM 1.4.2 is also NPTL aware making Linux processes look like they did in Solaris -1 PID for 1 process.
  • 3.0 is 64-bit clean making upgrades to 64-bit architecture easy
  • Major improvements in the NFS stack. Fixed all cross compatibility issues, especially with NetApp.
  • UDP is still the transport protocol for NFS, but TCP supported. 3.0 almost shipped with TCP as the standard transport.
  • Improvements in Logical Volume Mgmt.
  • Includes GCC 3.2 and debugging/profiling tools
  • Ext3 is the default file system. They will support many other including OCFS (Oracle Cluster File System)
  • SAMBA3 is included and it will integrate with Active Directory in native mode (Windows 2000)
  • 3 flavors of RedHat Enterprise Linux

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS

      • Only OS with 24×7 support
      • No CPU or memory limit
      • Includes all services including Mail, file/print, web, dns, dhcp, ldap, etc.

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES

      • 2 CPU or lower
      • 8 GB memory limit

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS

      • Meant as a client desktop for AS or ES
      • 2 CPU or lower + no memory restrictions


  • Clustering built-in with RedHat Cluster Manager. Supports active-active mode and can now support 8-16 nodes in a cluster instead of 2 in 2.1
  • Oracle is the #1 partner of RedHat.
  • EMC, NetAppliance, AMD, IBM, DELL and Sun are other partners.

With Novell acquiring Suse, the Enterprise Linux space just got a lot more interesting.

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