Red Hat Updates RHEL 5 with More Hardware, Software Support

Even though Nov. 20, 2010, marked Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6’s entry into the world, there’s still plenty going on with RHEL 5. Red Hat has made available RHEL 5.6, which builds upon RHEL 5’s base and continues to support customers who are using RHEL 5 through its anticipated 2014 lifecycle. Here’s what’s new…

Beyond the bug and security fixes, RHEL 5.6 comes equipped with new hardware support and “back-ports” of RHEL 6 enhancements like networking, web services, file systems and, of course, virtualization. Red Hat claims that 5.6 comes with more than 2,000 individual fixes and 340 individual enhancements.

RHEL 5 debuted in 2007, with its last update in March 2010. With RHEL 6 being introduced, it seems fitting for Red Hat to add some more polish to its long-term supported operating systems. RHEL 5 is set for a 2014 “end of lifecycle” but has an extended lifecycle until 2017.

Official support into 2014 means that Red Hat as brought 5.6 up to par with chipset, drivers and other OEM platform compatibility along with the all-important virtualization improvements, such as support for sVirt SELinux virtualization, virtual guests, I/O fencing capabilities and High Availability add ons.

Also included:

If you’re using RHEL 5.5, an update to 5.6 is easy to deploy. Check out the full release and details here.

The big focus here is the back-porting of features of RHEL 6 to RHEL 5.6, giving users of RHEL 5  a boost for future technology. That’s good news for VARs or MSPs leveraging RHEL 5 technology who can now provide or utilize a free value add for legacy systems.

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