Kernel questions about RHEL6, ESX support and experiences with F13a3

Still no official informations

Red Hat is still refusing any questions about the features of RHEL 6 and its Linux Kernel. However: Since Vanilla Kernel 2.6.33 vmxnet3 and pvscsi is supported. Fedora 13 Alpha 3 is shipped with a derivate of Kernel 2.6.33.

I still hope that Red Hat is switching to 2.6.33 or back-porting the VMWare code to its 2.6.32 derivative Kernel as known by RHEL 6 Alpha 3.

Experiences with F13a3 so far

Installing F13a3 on a ESX guest – with RHEL5 as “supported Guest OS”  – and enabled vmxnet “enhanced” plus pvscsci as HBA was a smooth experience. No driver disk was needed, no dirty fixes. Just selecting vmxnet3 as NIC and PVSCSCI as disk HBA. Thats the way RHEL6 should work from my point of view.

RHEV vs. VMWare ESX

Since Red Hat released its visualization solution “RHEV”, VMWare and Red Hat are competitors. Is Red Hat willing to include ESX support in its Enterprise Products? My guess is to not to do so, but I’m open for surprises.

The goals

The goal on the long term is to switch from ESX to KVM. However, if you deployed a large ESX farm already and the management members are members of the “ESX-Church” it will be hard.

The mid-term goal is to get rid of those crappy VMWare tools. The current state of this “Tools” definitively proves that VMWare is a Windows shop and  does not take care about Linux virtualization.

Will we have fun? Depends on EMC and Red Hat….

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