Even though the newest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is currently at version 6.3, and Red Hat is working on version 6.4 it still releases updates for RHEL 5 according to its 10-year lifecycle promise. Last week it released version 5.9 of its RHEL Linux distribution.

Version 5.9 introduces Microsoft Hyper-V drivers so that RHEL can be installed in a Virtual Machine running on top of Hyper-V natively.

Other new features and enhancements are:

• Support for the latest CPU, chipset and device driver enhancements
• Security enhancements
• OpenJDK 7 and SystemTrap improvements
• Rsyslog version 5
• Samba version 3.6