Red Hat has made Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 available, saying it enhances virtualization, desktop, security, clustering, networking and hardware support.

Virtualization of very large systems, with up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory, is now possible and there’s virtualization support for NUMA-based architectures.

The widgetry is certified for IBM’s novel new Cell Blade systems – not something everybody can say – and RHEL 5.2 Desktop updates desktop applications to OpenOffice 2.3 and Firefox 3.

Meanwhile, Novell has moved on to SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 Service Pack 2, which claims enhancements in virtualization, management, hardware enablement and interoperability.

It says SP2 is the only Xen-based virtualization solution with full support from Microsoft for Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2003 guests and live migration of those guests across physical machines.

Novell also unveiled a Subscription Management Tool for SP2 to better manage SUSE updates while allowing more restrictive corporate firewall policies. It’s a package proxy system integrated with Novell’s Customer Center and provides key Customer Center capabilities locally at the customer site.

Evidently it provides a repository and registration target synchronized with the Customer Center that offers more uniform, less frequent and more secure centralized deployment.

SP2 is supposed to improve interoperability with Windows and Office via local NTFS file system support, improved integration with Active Directory and an upgrade to OpenOffice.org 2.4 Novell Edition.

As announced in March at BrainShare, the next generation of SUSE Linux Enterprise, version 11, is due to arrive in the first half of 2009.