Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 incorporates Xen virtualization software, which has been integrated with the Linux kernel. Red Hat has been working on Xen for the last two years with IBM and the development community of the open-source technology.

Enterprise Linux 5 comes in two versions: the Advanced Platform for server deployments, and an Enterprise Desktop. The server platform can run on either an AMD64 Opteron processor or a Quad-Core Intel Xeon chip.

The hardware support provides the foundation for Red Hat's virtualization strategy. The company sees immediate demand for virtualization to run multiple instances of an operating system on one server to better use processing power, said Iain Gray, VP of global support services. In the future, Red Hat sees the use of its platform in service-oriented architectures.