User manual REDHAT ENTERPRISE LINUX 6 DATASHEET

[. . . ] With the flexibility to deploy on physical hardware, as a virtual host, as a virtual guest, or in the cloud, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is the ideal foundation for next-generation datacenters. It ensures long-term stability while continuing to innovate and deliver enhancements -- delivering the optimal combination of innovation and stability. Key partnerships across the industry allow Red Hat to ensure the stability of the platform across the broad ecosystem of systems and applications. With embedded engineering and deep collaboration, Red Hat is on the forefront of the commercial maturation of technology. [. . . ] Red Hat's approach to virtualization is easy to adopt because it is delivered as an integral part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform. Based upon kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) technology, Red Hat's virtualization capabilities are integrated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and leverage the latest hardware virtualization capabilities provided by Intel® and AMD® processor platforms. The modular design of Red Hat Enterprise Linux allows customers to choose when and where to use virtualization. For additional flexibility, customers can deploy both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft® Windows® as fully supported guests in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtualized environment. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also supports multiple virtualization use cases, from hardware abstraction for existing software stacks, to datacenter consolidation, to virtualized clusters and private clouds. Beyond core virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers leading support for advanced virtualized I/O capabilities through SR-IOV and nPIV standards. A standard virtualization management infrastructure, libvirt, developed by Red Hat and adopted by other operating systems, provides a flexible interface for defining, managing, and monitoring virtual machines. Red Hat Enterprise Linux powers many of the world's most demanding financial institutions " Our technology partnership with Red Hat is key to us staying competitive in the market. We look to Red Hat for technology leadership through updates and support that help us to improve our tuning so that we can give our customers the best possible experience. Joe Panfil, managing director of Enterprise Technology Services at CME Group http://customers. redhat. com/?s=CME Scalabilityandperformance 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. Within this broad framework, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 provides support for a variety of networking infrastructures, such as Infiniband and Ethernet, and for storage infrastructures, such as FCoE and iSCSI, as well as for traditional nAS, SAn, and DAS devices. Red Hat Enterprise Linux also offers high performance and scales from desktops to workstations, from blades to rack environments, from single CPu systems to the largest SMP servers and mainframes. As hardware upgrades continue to offer additional processing and storage capabilities, Red Hat Enterprise Linux allows customers to take advantage of those advances by selecting those scale-up and scale-out strategies and platform architectures that meet their business requirements. Red Hat continues to collaborate with its partners to deliver advanced functionality to customers. For example, improvements in virtualization performance make it practical to deploy any application workload, even I/O-bound applications, on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform. The most dramatic improvements in recent virtual machine performance are made possible by I/O optimizations, including support for new hardware capabilities, such as 10-gigabit SR-IOV adapters and NPIV. These have reduced overhead for I/O-bound environments to less than five percent, which opens the door to a whole new class of applications, such as database, transaction processing, and file servers. Red Hat, in cooperation with its hardware partners, is enabling reliability, availability, serviceability (RAS), and scalability features that have been recently introduced to mainstream architectures, and which minimize down time, increase availability, and protect data. Red Hat Enterprise Linux-powered systems have achieved leading results on industrystandard benchmarks as diverse as SpecWeb, which measures web serving; TPC-H for largescale data warehouses; and SpecVirt for server consolidation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is a foundation for getting the most from new server hardware on diverse workloads and across the IT infrastructure. www. redhat. com 3 Datasheet RED HAT EnTERPRISE LInux 6 Security Security for Red Hat Enterprise Linux begins with a core feature known as Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). government's national Security Agency (NSA), SELinux delivers a strong and flexible MAC framework to enforce role-based access control and multi-level security. SELinux support has been woven into all parts of the platform, including virtualization, to provide critical guest separation regardless of the guest operating system. [. . . ] As a host or a guest, Red Hat Enterprise Linux delivers the core technologies to deploy both private and public clouds. The application management, tuning, and security environment is consistent whether the workload is deployed on a physical system, as a virtual guest on any of the leading hypervisors, or with a public cloud provider. In shared and virtualized environments alike, the features and capabilities of Red Hat Enterprise Linux make it the ideal host and guest operating system. REFERENCE ARCHITECTURE LIBRARY The Red Hat Enterprise Linux reference architecture library includes comprehensive solutions that help customers get the most out of their Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based environments. These reference architectures explain the capabilities of a given solution and provide instructions for implementing best practices for such things as provisioning, management, configuration, and performance tuning. [. . . ]