Red Hat Inc. has pushed out the first public beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, an upgrade to its operating system that includes virtualization technologies intended to help companies get more use from their hardware.

The company had said it would ship the final version of the product by year’s end, although it’s unclear now if Red Hat will meet that target. RHEL 5 Beta 1, which was released Friday, was originally due to ship in July, with a second beta expected in September.

The beta slipped because the company decided to wait for a later version of the Linux kernel, 2.6.18, to be finalized, according to Joel Berman, product management director for RHEL. He said it wasn’t due to a memory management issue, as had been rumored, although there may have been a few memory bugs as well, he said.

The final product will come ship around the end of the year, “maybe a month before or after,” he said. A second beta will be released before that, probably in about a month. “For Red Hat the most important thing is that it works,” he said.

The beta is aimed primarily at existing subscribers to the Red Hat Network. Non-customers can try out the software but they have to contact a local Red Hat office or apply here. (The page says RHEL 4 but Red Hat says it’s for RHEL 5 as well).

http://www.redhat.com/rhel/details/eval/

The beta is for testing purposes and Red Hat emphasized that it’s not intended for production use. It’s asking for feedback to hone the final version, and wants to hear about how it is implementing the open-source Xen virtualization technology in particular.

Xen allows companies to run multiple operating systems on a server at the same time, making better use of computing power that’s often otherwise left idle. Virtualization on mainframes has been around for a long time, but it’s now being adopted on lower-end servers as well as they become more powerful.

 

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