The only thing holding Linux back from the very largest commercial applications is the inherent conservatism of the I&O professionals who run large UNIX transactional environments, and as Linux accumulates additional customer evidence, the migration of UNIX workloads to x86 Linux will continue. At this point, with RHEL 7 and other Linux distributions running on large Xeon E7 V2 servers, there seems to be little to choose between UNIX and Linux in terms of high-end scalability except in those very few cases where monolithic SMP runtime environments exceed 96 cores.

Scalability – The Linux kernel now scales to 4096 x86 CPUs and up to 16 TB of memory, well into high-end UNIX server territory, and will support the largest x86 servers currently shipping.

In addition to the required low-level plumbing – schedulers, memory management and file systems capable of keeping up with both high-volume transactions and operating effectively in large distributed clusters – Red Hat has also focused on features to improve the installation and management experience, thus directly reducing cost of ownership, following in the footsteps of other modern OS development trajectories.Īmong the enterprise technology that caught my eye: In effect, Linux has continued its maturation to the point where its feature set and scalability begin to look like and feel like a top-tier UNIX. It is apparent, both from the details on RHEL 7 and from perusing the documentation on other distribution providers, that Linux has continued to mature nicely as both a foundation for large scale-out clouds as well as a strong contender for the kind of enterprise workloads that previously were only comfortable on either RISC/UNIX systems or large Microsoft Server systems. Built primarily on recent versions of the Linux 3.0 et seq kernel available to the entire Linux community, including SUSE, Red Hat, Cannonical and others, RHEL 7 continues the progress of the Linux community toward an OS that is fully capable of replacing proprietary RISC/UNIX for the vast majority of enterprise workloads.

The latest turn of the crank for Linux, in the form of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7), reinforces this opinion. When the first Linux distributions based on the 3.0 kernel were released almost a year ago, I was struck by how far Linux had advanced.

Latest rhel 7 version