Red Hat has unveiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) after nearly two years in the making. 

The software focuses on "customer pain points", according to Red Hat executive vice president of engineering Paul Cormier.

"Customers were unable to consume all the technology being sold to them, and it was not solving their business problems effectively. Our resolve has been, and will always be, to deliver software that solves real business needs," he said.

The software's most important new feature is support for the open source Xen virtualisation technology.

Xen allows virtual system images to run directly on the operating system without the need for additional software, and supports hardware acceleration technologies that AMD and Intel have built into their processors.

Novell's SuSE Linux distribution was the first to offer Xen support with the launch of SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 last year.  

Virtualisation technology is generally believed to be the 'next big thing' in enterprise computing, allowing users to consolidate multiple physical servers on a single machine, thereby increasing server utilisation while cutting maintenance costs.

Red Hat previously offered two versions of its operating system: the low-end RHEL Edge Server and the high-end RHEL Advanced Server. 

The Advanced product has now been rebranded as RHEL 5 Advanced Platform. The low-end product will become simply Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

The two new versions are a departure from Red Hat's previous packaging. Prior versions offered the same underlying technology and differentiated through basic or 24/7 support and the number of supported processors.

"Now with RHEL5, we have the basic version and Advanced Platform," Nick Carr, a marketing director with Red Hat, told vnunet.com.

"There are significant technology differences for virtualisation in the form of unlimited server guests and storage virtualisation.

"We are moving form the same technology at different price levels to different technology in the two products."