Crenshaw wasn't able to provide specific numbers but said many Samba developers were among those who had made the move. Chief Samba eveloper, Jeremy Allison, left Novell some months back and moved over to Google, in protest against the deal which saw Novell get into bed with Microsoft.

"A sizeable number of high-quality people have left Novell", Crenshaw said from Singapore yesterday afternoon, while discussing the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, a release that has placed a great deal of emphasis on virtualisation.

Virtualisation is being implemented through the open-source product Xen, now a mature application. The licensing for virtualisation is simplified and the number of instances will to a large extent depend on what the hardware in question is capable of handling.

There are two main lines, client and server, for RHEL 5. The base server allows four instances of virtualisation, the advanced platform is not limited. The client offering has four variations.

A number of graphical tools are provided to both create and managed virtual machines; Red Hat Network Satellite modules including update, management, provisioning and monitoring are all extended to work on hosts and guests alike.

To do battle with Oracle - which took the battle to Red Hat some months ago by offering its own so-called Unbreakable Linux product - Red Hat has announced a "database availability solution". This enables existing databases - Oracle, Sybase, MySQL EnterpriseDB, DB2 and others - to provide the reliability of clustered database systems, at what Red Hat claims are savings of $US200,000 or more per database, compared to the cost of the leading clustered database system. That reference, of course, is to Oracle.