BANGALORE, INDIA: The latest release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Server boasts of many interesting features. It comes in three different flavors but Red Hat doesn't ship them separately.

There's a single set of CDs for it and another one for desktops. During installation you have to choose what flavor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux you would want to install.

Like other open source OS distros, RHEL has also upgraded its kernel version to 2.6.18, to include support for IPv6, shared cache and multi-core systems.

Also RHEL 5 includes troubleshooting tools for SELinux, which is a GUI based analyzer to help you take action in case of a security alert.

Key highlights
First is the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advance Platform, targeted toward large enterprises and that supports servers of all sizes. It also supports unlimited virtual guests and storage virtualization.

It is packaged as an integrated solution for enterprises, which includes server and storage virtualization technology in a single product. Apart from virtualization technologies this flavor provides you management capabilities such as virt-manager which allows you to manage all virtual machines running on the system, Libvirt, which is a C toolkit or an API for managing virtual machines.

The two features are also given with the second flavor but the difference is that here they have provided a conga cluster/storage GUI for managing storage and clusters. This particular flavor of RHEL 5 also includes the Red Hat Cluster Suite which provides you with failover capabilities, so that an application can be moved between two guest OSes or on between two different physical systems, within minutes in case of system failure.

In Fedora 8, SELinux and Firewall configuration tools are separate. The same is the case with RHEL 5, but here you also have SELinux troubleshooter

The second flavor is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is targeted at small deployments, especially places where a server is focused on a single application. For example, the server could be a web server or a mail server. It can supports upto 2 processor sockets and a max of four virtual guests.

The third one, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop is a full fledged desktop operating system similar to other open source Linux operating systems. It includes applications that are suitable for office users. Like other open source distros, it also features a 3D desktop and has support for virtualization for up to four guests.