Advantages of RHEL6 over RHEL5

Advantages of RHEL6 over RHEL5

It is popularly used as server operating system. Its first release was the RHEl 2.1 which was released in the year 2002. After the first version of RHEL, new and better versions quickly followed like RHEL 3,4,5,etc. Now in 2010, the newest version has been released. It is RHEL 6. Now in this post lets discuss the main advantages of RHEL6 over RHEL5.

• Virtualization: In RHEL 6 KVM (Kernel based Virtual Machine) was used as a hypervisor but in the earlier releases of RHEL XEN was used as a hypervisor. The main advantage of KVM is that it supports the installation of many virtual machines/operating systems like Windows, Linux, Solaris and also it is very easy to manage those virtual machines.
• Security: RHEL6 has an enhanced version of SELinux(Security Enhanced Linux) now, Basically now the features are more improved and there are various new set of rules which are added to SELinux one of such rule/feature is of SVirt which provides security to virtual machines from hackers.
• EXT4: It stands for Extended 4, It has various new advantages then EXT2/3 which were used in earlier version(s) of RHEL. EXT4 is comparatively more faster and easy to manage then previous file systems.
• IPv6: RHEL6 supports IPv6.
• NFS4: It uses NFSv4 (Network File Transfer) the latest version of NFS for the sharing of files in the network rather than NFSv3. it is used TCP port.
• Improvements of minor updates
        Red Hat releases minor versions such as 6.1, 6.2. These minor versions are the accumulated updates of the major version. The new minor releases will not only contain bug fixes but will also have major changes and new features. 
  
•  Use of Drivers:
       RHEL6 has drivers for speeding up operations under KVM, VMware and Xen.
• GUI: It has a far better GUI(Graphical User Interface) then RHE5 or any of its prior version(s).