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11Nov/103

RHEL 6 Launched

I didn't even notice it, as The Register put it, it was a very quiet launch. While I have been using Debian on my home systems for more than twelve years now, I do much prefer to use Red Hat Enterprise at work.

And RHEL 6 looks like a pretty decent upgrade

  • Significantly improved power management (aka lower cpu usage for idle VMs) - hello higher consolidation ratios
  • Hot add CPU and memory (wish there was hot remove - if there is I don't see it mentioned)
  • 85% increase in number of packages in the distribution - yay, maybe there will be a lot less things I will have to compile on my own

Sorry I still can't help but laugh at the scalability claims

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has been designed to deliver performance and scalability without sacrificing data integrity. It allows scaling to 4,096 CPUs and 64 terabytes of RAM, providing a solid foundation for supporting upcoming generations of hardware.

It is interesting that the max file system size for the ext4 file system is the same as ext3 - 16TB. Seems kind of dinky.

XFS goes to 100TB which also seems small, maybe just "tested" limits, I would expect XFS to scale far higher than that given it's SGI heritage. The XFS documentation says for 64-bit Linux you can go to 18 Exabytes, which I think is just as crazy as Red Hat's CPU claims but as long as you can safely do a few hundred TB that is more than enough for these days I think.

I can't imagine anyone committing a petabyte or more to a single file system for a good long while at least.

I'll let others play with KVM until at least RHEL 7, until then it's VMware for me.

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TechOps Guy: Nate

Filed under: News, linux Leave a comment
Comments (3) Trackbacks (0)
  1. Gavin Carr
    November 12th, 2010 - 06:04

    ext4 actually supports filesystems up to 1 EB. But the current e2fsprogs still has the 16TB limit baked in, so you can’t actually to a mkfs on anything larger than that. I do wish they’d get that fixed though. Now RHEL supports xfs I’ve migrated a few large volumes from ext3 to xfs because of that limit.

  2. Nate
    November 12th, 2010 - 08:57

    good to know, thanks!!

  3. scott mccarty
    August 28th, 2011 - 22:22

    Just out of curiosity, why no kvm until thel7?


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