Red Hat will soon release Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), its enterprise Linux product on February 28, with major virtualization technology as one of the operating system’s highlights. Originally slated to be released by the end of 2006, Red Hat began giving itself some room to work with when the first RHEL 5 beta was released in September. The second OS beta was released in November.

The company is determined to released a gold version of RHEL 5 on February 28, according to Chief Executive Matthew Szulik. Analysts have confirmed that a several month delay to iron out remaining bugs and flaws should be beneficial.

Red Hat’s latest operating system is based on the 2.6.18 version of the Linux kernel, while RHEL 4 is based on the 2.6.9 kernel. Xen virtualization, software that allows a single PC run multiple operating systems at once, is one of the key features included with RHEL 5.

Red Hat still remains one of the most popular flavors of Linux. As RHEL 5 will be released on the market soon, Novell has already started shipping Xen with its SUSE Linux Enterprise Server operating system. Another major competitor, Oracle, announced in October that it would be releasing a free RHEL and sell its own support for it.

Report from DailyTech.