Here are a few interesting excerpts from the recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 announcement for general availability and today's Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 beta announcement.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 now Generally Available

Red Hat announced the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10, the latest minor release of the mature Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Platform.  With an emphasis on providing greater stability for critical applications, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 offers enhanced features for reliability and security, including an updated version of OpenSCAP – the open source Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) configuration scanner, which meets the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST) SCAP 1.2 standard.

Beyond OpenSCAP, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 also includes:

  • MySQL 5.5, the most recent, stable version of that open source database. MySQL 5.5 includes a number of improvements in terms of speed, scalability, and ease of use. For customers' convenience, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 also includes MySQL 5.1, which is required in order to upgrade to MySQL 5.5.
  • Enhanced Subscription Management Tools, which now provide more insight into how customers can optimize and benefit from their Red Hat subscriptions.

  • Red Hat Access, delivered through the Red Hat Support Tool, provides an integrated, seamless way to get answers with exclusive Red Hat Knowledge, use Red Hat’s automated diagnostic services for problem determination and engage with Red Hat directly from a Linux terminal.
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.10 customers with Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer subscriptions also have access to Red Hat Developer Toolset 2.0.

See the Red Hat announcement for details about RHEL 5.10 and resources.

Latest Beta Release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Now Available

Today, Red Hat also announced the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5. To keep pace with the demand for enterprise-class infrastructure, the newest version of the leading Linux platform extends its scalability and manageability to aid in the build-out and control of large, complex IT environments. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 will be designed to simplify the operation of mission-critical SAP applications by automating the optimal configuration of common SAP deployments. The beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 also offers enhancements and new capabilities in key areas such as:

  • Subscription Management Services - Improvements to manage the local system and its allocated subscriptions. The Subscription Manager agent connects the system to the Red Hat Customer Portal or to an on-premise subscription management service set-up by the customer using Subscription Asset Manager.
  • Scalability - Kernel dump files on large systems can now scale to multiple terabytes of data, and a new compression algorithm (LZO) speeds the creation of dump files, leading to reduced down time during crash dump generation and faster troubleshooting.
  • Networking - Networking enhancements include: better analysis of multicast traffic; Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) association statistics in support of SS7 M3UA implementations provide additional monitoring capabilities for customers within the telecommunications sector; and IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol Version 2 (PTPv2), used for precisely synchronizing clocks in an Ethernet network.
  • Storage - Enhancements are:  improved control and recovery in iSCSI and Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) environments; broader device support for Multipath IO; addition of Intel's NVM Express driver; and FUSE-based file systems, like GlusterFS, can now use asynchronous IO for improved performance.
  • Virtualization - The Red Hat guest can serve as a client to the highly scalable Gluster filesystem and Red Hat Storage. The maximum memory for Red Hat guests has increased to four terabytes, allowing guests to run large-scale workloads, and dynamic hot-add functionality for virtual CPUs enables customers to add compute resources to installed guests on-the-fly, reducing downtime.
  • Security - Security enhancements are:  NSS, GnuTLS, OpenSSL and Java can now share a single, system-wide static data store, which can be used by crypto-toolkits as input for trusted certificate decisions, something that is required by many corporate deployments; support for smartcard authentication by providing single-sign-on capabilities across more application subsystems; the latest version of OpenSCAP, an authenticated scanner that meets the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) SCAP 1.2 certification requirements; and support for the latest Transport Layer Security (TLS 1.2) standard, allowing secure network communication.
  • Desktop and tools - The beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 also features several desktop and graphical enhancements. Users can now remotely operate Windows 7 and Windows 8 desktops and Windows Server 2012 consoles using the RDP protocol, and customers running the Evolution mail client will now experience better integration with Microsoft Exchange, especially from a calendaring perspective. Additionally, the base LibreOffice software is updated to 4.0, which provides a host of office workflow improvements.

See the Red Hat announcement for details about RHEL 6.5 beta.

Last updated: February 26, 2024