Red Hat has released its second Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 beta, pushing it our earlier than expected in an apparent response to Microsoft and Novell having smoked the peace pipe.

The beta has Xen virtualization coupled with clustering support, something Novell has been out with since July. As Al Gillen over at IDC observes, incorporating virtualization technologies into the operating system is a "major industry development" that will have a "long-term impact on how customers design their computer infrastructure, how they deploy and how they plan for scalability, availability and continuity."

Gillen says Red Hat's approach in integrating virtualization and clustering together with the file system gives Red Hat the capability "to go beyond basic server consolidation, and empowers users to address more sophisticated virtualization requirements."

RHEL 5 has been in development for almost two years and represents kernel enhancements made from 2.6.9 to 2.6.18. It's supposed to be highly secure and have "dramatically improved" desktop capability a.k.a. RHET 5 Client.

Now that Novell is tied up with Microsoft, people will watch how it plays the desktop card. Red Hat will supposedly make a stronger bid for the business desktop with the new release and price it cheap.

Red Hat says network and I/O subsystems have also been worked over for optimal performance and scalability.

Red Hat's virtualization currently works on x86 and x86-64 widgets. Xen for the Itanium is still a technology preview. Red Hat is using Xen 3.01, the latest rev.