Preview: Running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 In Amazon's EC2 Cloud

For those in need of a quick and easy place to experiment and trial Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, which was released as stable earlier this month, it's easy to do so within Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. It's running well using a Xen HVM instance and so I have run some preliminary benchmarks against SUSE Enterprise and Ubuntu Linux.

While I ran some early tests of RHEL 7.0 -- including its release candidate -- I didn't have a chance to evaluate the release build up until trying the EC2 instance due to traveling and now in the process of setting up the new Phoronix office. In July I should have some proper benchmarks (hopefully with CentOS 7), but for some early benchmarks to toss out now of RHEL7 just for reference purposes, I have some basic numbers from Amazon's cloud.

This week I ran some clean, out-of-the-box tests on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and SUSE Enterprise Linux 11 SP3. The 64-bit builds were used for all three enterprise Linux distributions, using the Xen HVM versions of the AMIs, and using the other default values. The Amazon EC2 c3.xlarge instance type boasts four virtual CPUs, 7.5GB of system memory, and 2 x 40GB SSD storage. During the testing this week, the c3.xlarge instance types for these Xen HVM virtual machine instances were powered by Intel Xeon E5-2680 2.8GHz hardware.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0 uses the Linux 3.10 kernel, GCC 4.8.2 compiler, and XFS file-system by default. SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP3 meanwhile is with the EXT3 file-system, Linux 3.0 kernel, and GCC 4.3.4. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS has the Linux 3.13 kernel, GCC 4.8.2, and the EXT4 file-system.

All of these Linux cloud benchmarks were fully automated and standardized using the Phoronix Test Suite. Again, the benchmarks in this article should just be taken as some preview, reference figures. In July I should be back with some bare-metal numbers from my controlled environment across an array of hardware.