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Red Hat is pursuing a certification for its Linux OS and virtualization, paving the way for government agencies to use the technology to create secure, virtualized IT environments and private clouds.

The Linux vendor has entered into an agreement with Atsec information security to certify Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 under Common Criteria at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4, according to a Red Hat blog post.

Common Criteria is a standard evaluation rating issued by the National Information Assurance Partnership that government customers use to evaluate the security of IT products before making purchasing decisions.

The pursuit of certification also will cover the KVM hypervisor on both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. A hypervisor enables an OS to run virtually without the need for a physical server, reducing the number of energy resources a data center requires.

KVM, or Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), is the virtualization infrastructure for the Linux kernel. Red Hat’s virtualization leverages RHEL’s Security-Enhanced Linux feature, a joint project development by the National Security Agency and the Linux community to provide high levels of security.

SELinux in particular ensures virtual resources run in separate containers, which protects each one individually in case of intrusion. Protecting each virtualized resource individually is one guideline the National Institute of Standards and Technology recently offered as a way to address common concerns about implementing virtualization.

By including hypervisor technology in its certification, Red Hat will enable government customers to host multiple tenants on a single machine, allowing for a private cloud-computing infrastructure, according to the vendor.

The federal government increasingly is using virtualization to create more efficient and cost-effective data centers as part of an agency-wide consolidation effort.

Security often has been an area of concern for people using virtualization technology, but that perception is beginning to change as the technology becomes more sophisticated and widely used, and security issues taken into consideration by those developing hypervisors.

Red Hat already has achieved Common Criteria certification 13 different times on four different Linux platforms.

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With Wednesday’s beta release of its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Red Hat has added a number of new capabilities that should help data centers better support virtualization and cloud computing.

RHEL 6.0 will also have at least one less feature as well. This will be the first version of the OS not to include the Xen hypervisor. Instead the company plans to focus its virtualization efforts around the kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), said Tim Burke, Red Hat vice president of platform engineering.

For RHEL 6, “Virtualization has been a key focus, as has providing infrastructure that will be part of our cloud services,” Burke said.

To help in cloud deployments, the RHEL 6 OS has the ability to dynamically allocate kernel data structures. “This will allow cloud service providers to give better service-level agreements,” Burke said. As virtual machines are loaded on to the OS, the administrator can specify how much memory, how many processing cycles and how much network bandwidth can be allotted to each machine.

Another new addition is the Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS), which “more dynamically balances the workloads among the tasks,” distributing the CPU resources more evenly across all the applications. Borrowing techniques from Red Hat’s software for running latency-intolerant services, it also does a more sophisticated job of scheduling high-priority processes over low-priority ones, Burke said.

Power savings features have been added. The timing infrastructure has been reorganized as well, and uses something called the tickless kernel enhancement. Previously, the kernel would interrupt the CPU 1,000 times per second to take a time measurement, which prevented the CPU going into power-saving sleep mode. The tickless kernel feature relies instead on hardware-based timers, allowing the CPU to go to sleep in those periods when there are no other chores to complete.

The file systems space has been revamped for larger data sets. This is the first version of RHEL to use ext4 as the default file system. (Formerly it used ext3.) RHEL can now run file systems of up to 16 terabytes. The new file system also runs file system checks much more speedily, which means faster recovery times after unclean shutdowns. For really big data sets, RHEL also includes an option to upgrade to SGI’s XFS file system, which can scale to 128 terabytes.

With Red Hat’s emphasis on supporting cloud computing, the company’s decision to drop Xen may seem surprising. But over the past few years, Red Hat has increasingly thrown its support behind KVM. In 2008, the company purchased virtualization software provider Qumranet, whose developers pioneered much of the early KVM work.

Burke said that one of the reasons Xen was dropped is that the company was duplicating a lot of effort in maintaining two hypervisors, a job that requires an increasing amount of energy. For instance, Intel added some virtualization support capabilities in its just-released Nehalem server processor, but these capabilities required some modifications in both sets of software.

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We are excited to share with you news of our first public step toward our next major Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform release with today’s Beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Beginning today, we are inviting our customers, partners and members of the public to install, test and provide feedback for what we expect will be one of our most ambitious and important operating platform releases to date. This blog is the first in a series of upcoming posts that will cover different aspects of the new platform.

It has been almost eight years since the first release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since then, the product has established itself as one of the leading enterprise-caliber, open source operating systems. With installed systems in use from laptops to mainframes, it has helped set standards for quality, certified infrastructure, long-haul stability, performance and security. From Main Street to Wall Street, Red Hat Enterprise Linux touches almost every industry.

As Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 enters Beta today, the currently supported release, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, continues to be the cornerstone of Red Hat’s software product portfolio. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 was first released in March 2007, and has received regular updates since that time. Just last month, we delivered the fifth update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform with new features and hardware support. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 platform will continue to be supported by Red Hat and its ISV and OEM partners until 2014.

Looking to the future, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 blurs the lines between virtual, physical and cloud computing to address shifts taking place in the modern IT environment. Featuring updated core technology, from the kernel to the application infrastructure to the development toolchain, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is designed to meet the needs of the coming generations of hardware and software technologies.

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Red Hat is updating its flagship Linux server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), to version 5.5 providing performance and feature improvements.

The new Red Hat (NYSE:RHT) release takes advantage of the latest Intel and AMD processors as well as advancements in virtualization and Windows interoperability. The release of RHEL 5.5 comes as Red Hat is about to begin to ramp up its next generation Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform.

“We overlap on our releases as it takes many years to produce the new version – RHEL 6 – which is currently in development,” Tim Burke, vice president of platform engineering at Red Hat, told InternetNews.com. “Within the coming month we’ll have our beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.”

Burke added that Red Hat will have some additional announcements on RHEL 6 likely coming out of their Red Hat Summit event in June. RHEL 6 will be the first major version update for Red Hat since the first release of RHEL 5 in 2007.

There is still lots of life left in the RHEL 5 platform though with a new point update to RHEL 5.5 now available. RHEL 5.5 has been in public beta testing since last month. The 5.5 update is the first update to RHEL in 2010; the RHEL 5.4 release came out in September of 2009.

One of the biggest new items in RHEL 5.5 according to Burke is hardware enablement for the latest Intel Westmere and AMD Opteron 6000platforms.

“The hardware is of nominal value until you’ve got the software to enable it and that’s what really shines in RHEL 5.5,” Burke said. “We’ve done a huge number of scalability enhancements for both bare metal and virtualization environments.”

In RHEL 5.5, Red Hat has improved workload processor scheduling to ensure that the required number of processor cores is being used. Burke added that Red Hat also focuses on I/O optimization in RHEL 5.5 which makes a difference for virtualization.

“In the past, a lot of workloads were not well suited for virtualization because the overhead incurred from an I/O operation could be as much as 30 percent,” Burke said. “But because of a lot of the new hardware capabilities that we’ve been able to optimize in RHEL 5.5, overhead for I/O bound workloads is now down to only 5 percent, so that opens up broad diversity of workload types that can on virtualization.”

Part of the I/O improvements come by way of support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV). Burke explained that SR-IOV provides KVM virtual machines with an improved ability to share hardware-bound PCI hardware resources.
New Run-Time Memory Allocation Feature

Virtualization also gets a boost by way of a new run-time memory allocation feature for RHEL 5.5′s KVM virtualization guests. Burke said that when an administrator has multiple virtual guests on the same system there is a need to make sure that no one guest can monopolize all of the physical memory. With the new feature, memory can be allocated based on need, policy and availability.

In RHEL 5.5, Red Hat has also improved interoperability with Microsoft’s Windows 7, though Burke was quick to note that the interoperability did not come by way of any deal with Microsoft. Rival Linux vendor Novell has a three year old agreement with Microsoft on interoperability and intellectual property related issues. The improved RHEL 5.5 interoperability involved the use of the open source Samba project which enables file and print services sharing between Windows and Linux.

“There is no special business deal related to Window interoperability,” Burke said. “It’s all work that we have pulled in with Samba and is done purely in the context of the upstream Samba development community of which Red Hat has several key contributors.”

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