News

Fedora 20 Has Enhanced Cloud, Virtualization Support

“Heisenbug” adds ARM as its primary architecture and enhances cloud and virtualization support.

• By Christa Ayer
• 12/20/2013

Red Hat is celebrating Fedora's 10th anniversary with a new release of the Linux-based operating system. Fedora 20, code-named “Heisenbug,” sports new usability, developer, and network management features, as well as amped-up support for virtualization and cloud computing.

The biggest change for the platform is the addition of ARM as its primary architecture. According to Red Hat, even though the majority its Fedora user base is x86/x86_64, ARM is gaining momentum--especially in the mobile world--and shows great promise as a powerful and cost-effective server technology. 

On the virtualization and cloud computing front, Fedora 20 introduces what Red Hat calls first-class cloud images. These images are designed to run as guests in public and private clouds like Amazon Web Services and OpenStack. Also new is the VM Snapshot UI, which makes taking VM snapshots much easier via a UI that's part of virt-manager. 

As part of its ARM support, the new version fixes running ARM virtual machines on x86 hosts using standard libvirt tools. 

Administrators will also now be able to add, edit, delete, activate, and deactivate network connections via the nmcli command-line tool, simplifying non-desktop uses of Fedora. Fedora's NetworkManager is also getting support for bonding interfaces and bridging interfaces, which are necessary for virtualization and fail-over scenarios.