There are a number of commercial products based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Information about these products and the version of RHEL they are based on is often difficult to come by, since this fact is not widely publicised. Sometimes it is possible to run the 'uname -r' command to get the kernel release and then cross-reference it with the RHEL version history.
Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises and is a subsidiary of IBM. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-64, Power ISA, ARM64, and IBM Z and a desktop version for x86-64. Fedora Linux and CentOS Stream serve as its upstream sources. All of Red Hat's official support and training, together with the Red Hat Certification Program, focuses on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.
Xen is a free and open-source type-1 hypervisor, providing services that allow multiple computer operating systems to execute on the same computer hardware concurrently. It was originally developed by the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory and is now being developed by the Linux Foundation with support from Intel, Citrix, Arm Ltd, Huawei, AWS, Alibaba Cloud, AMD, Bitdefender and epam.
CentOS is a discontinued Linux distribution that provided a free and open-source community-supported computing platform, functionally compatible with its upstream source, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In January 2014, CentOS announced the official joining with Red Hat while staying independent from RHEL, under a new CentOS governing board.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivatives are Linux distributions that are based on the source code of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Platform virtualization software, specifically emulators and hypervisors, are software packages that emulate the whole physical computer machine, often providing multiple virtual machines on one physical platform. The table below compares basic information about platform virtualization hypervisors.
SipXecs is a free software enterprise communications system. It was initially developed by Pingtel Corporation in 2003 as a voice over IP telephony server located in Boston, MA. The server was later extended with additional collaboration capabilities as part of the SIPfoundry project. Since its extension, sipXecs now acts as a software implementation of the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), making it a full IP-based communications system.
VPN-1 is a firewall and VPN product developed by Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.
Oracle Linux is a Linux distribution packaged and freely distributed by Oracle, available partially under the GNU General Public License since late 2006. It is compiled from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source code, replacing Red Hat branding with Oracle's. It is also used by Oracle Cloud and Oracle Engineered Systems such as Oracle Exadata and others.
VMware ESXi is an enterprise-class, type-1 hypervisor developed by VMware, a subsidiary of Broadcom, for deploying and serving virtual computers. As a type-1 hypervisor, ESXi is not a software application that is installed on an operating system (OS); instead, it includes and integrates vital OS components, such as a kernel.
A virtual security appliance is a computer appliance that runs inside virtual environments. It is called an appliance because it is pre-packaged with a hardened operating system and a security application and runs on a virtualized hardware. The hardware is virtualized using hypervisor technology delivered by companies such as VMware, Citrix and Microsoft. The security application may vary depending on the particular network security vendor. Some vendors such as Reflex Systems have chosen to deliver Intrusion Prevention technology as a Virtualized Appliance, or as a multifunctional server vulnerability shield delivered by Blue Lane. The type of security technology is irrelevant when it comes to the definition of a Virtual Security Appliance and is more relevant when it comes to the performance levels achieved when deploying various types of security as a virtual security appliance. Other issues include visibility into the hypervisor and the virtual network that runs inside.
oVirt is a free, open-source virtualization management platform. It was founded by Red Hat as a community project on which Red Hat Virtualization is based. It allows centralized management of virtual machines, compute, storage and networking resources, from an easy-to-use web-based front-end with platform independent access. KVM on x86-64, PowerPC64 and s390x architecture are the only hypervisors supported, but there is an ongoing effort to support ARM architecture in a future releases.
Oracle VM Server for x86 is the server virtualization offering from Oracle Corporation. Oracle VM Server for x86 incorporates the free and open-source Xen hypervisor technology, supports Windows, Linux, and Solaris guests and includes an integrated Web based management console. Oracle VM Server for x86 features fully tested and certified Oracle Applications stack in an enterprise virtualization environment.
Qumranet, Inc. was an enterprise software company offering a desktop virtualization platform based on hosted desktops in Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) on servers, linked with their SPICE protocol. The company was also the creator, maintainer and global sponsor of the KVM open source hypervisor.
VMware vSphere is VMware's cloud computing virtualization platform.
libvirt is an open-source API, daemon and management tool for managing platform virtualization. It can be used to manage KVM, Xen, VMware ESXi, QEMU and other virtualization technologies. These APIs are widely used in the orchestration layer of hypervisors in the development of a cloud-based solution.
6WIND is a virtual networking software company delivering disaggregated and cloud-native solutions to CSPs and enterprises globally. The company is privately held and headquartered in the West Paris area, in Montigny-le-Bretonneux. 6WIND has a global presence with offices in the US and APAC. The company provides virtualized networking software which is deployed in bare-metal or in virtual machines on COTS servers in public & private clouds. Their solutions are disaggregated and containerized based on the cloud-native architecture.
Linux on IBM Z or Linux on zSystems is the collective term for the Linux operating system compiled to run on IBM mainframes, especially IBM Z / IBM zSystems and IBM LinuxONE servers. Similar terms which imply the same meaning are Linux/390, Linux/390x, etc. The three Linux distributions certified for usage on the IBM Z hardware platform are Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, and Ubuntu.
CloudStack is open-source Infrastructure-as-a-Service cloud computing software for creating, managing, and deploying infrastructure cloud services. It uses existing hypervisor platforms for virtualization, such as KVM, VMware vSphere, including ESXi and vCenter, XenServer/XCP and XCP-ng. In addition to its own API, CloudStack also supports the Amazon Web Services (AWS) API and the Open Cloud Computing Interface from the Open Grid Forum.
Harvester is a cloud native hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) open source software. Harvester was announced in 2020 by SUSE.