Red Hat launches latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

Red Hat, Inc. has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 expands Red Hat’s vision of providing an enterprise platform that has the stability to free IT to take on major infrastructure challenges and the flexibility to handle future requirements, with an extensive partner and support ecosystem.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 is designed for those who build and manage large, complex IT projects, especially enterprises that require an open hybrid cloud. From security and networking to virtualization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 provides the capabilities needed to manage these environments, such as tools that aid in quickly tuning the system to run SAP applications based on published best practices from SAP.

Securing the Next-Generation Enterprise
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 continues the push for integrated security functionality that combines ease-of-use and up-to-date security standards into the platform. The addition of a centralized certificate trust store enables standardized certificate access for security services. Also included are tools that meet leading security standards, including OpenSCAP 2.1, which implements the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) 1.2 standard. With these additions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 provides a secure platform upon which to build mission-critical services and applications.

Networking – When Every (Micro)Second Matters
In the financial services and trading-related industries, application latency is measured in microseconds, not seconds. Now, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 fully supports sub-microsecond clock accuracy over the local area network (LAN) using the Precision Time Protocol (PTP). Precision time synchronization is a key enabler for delivering better performance for high-speed, low latency applications. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 can now be used to track time on trading transactions, improving time stamp accuracy on archived data or precisely synchronizing time locally or globally.

Thanks to other networking enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5, system administrators now have a more comprehensive view of network activity. These new capabilities enable sysadmins to inspect IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) data to list multicast router ports, multicast groups with active subscribers and their associated interfaces, all of which are important to many modern networking scenarios, including streaming media.

Virtualization Enhancements
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 continues Red Hat’s commitment to improving the overall virtualization experience and includes several improvements that make it a compelling choice for running in virtualized environments. Sysadmins can now dynamically enable or disable virtual processors (vCPUs) in active guests, making it an ideal choice for elastic workloads. The handling of memory intensive applications as Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests has also been improved, with configurations supported for up to 4TB of memory on the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

The KVM hypervisor also integrates with GlusterFS volumes to provide direct access to the distributed storage platform, improving performance when accessing Red Hat Storage or GlusterFS volumes. Finally, guest drivers have been updated to improve performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 running as a guest on supported third-party hypervisors.

Evolving Ease-of-Use, Storage, and More
As application deployment options grow, portability becomes increasingly important. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 enables customers to deploy application images in containers created using Docker in their environment of choice: physical, virtual, or cloud. Docker is an open source project to package and run lightweight, self-sufficient containers; containers save developers time by eliminating integration and infrastructure design tasks.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 stays current with the advancements in Solid-State Drive (SSD) controller interface, introducing support for NVM Express (NVMe)-based SSDs. The NVMe specification aims to standardize the interface for PCIe-based SSDs and its inclusion in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 positions the platform to support an expanding range of future NVMe-based devices.

Improvements have also been added to improve enterprise storage scalability within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5. It is now possible to configure more than 255 LUNs connected to a single iSCSI target. In addition, control and recovery from SAN for iSCSI and Fibre Channel has been enhanced, and updates to the kexec/kdump mechanism now make it possible to create debug (dump) files on systems configured with very large memory (e.g. 6TB).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 makes it easier to track and manage subscription consumption across the enterprise, integrating subscription tracking into existing business workflow. Usability enhancements include support for remote access to Windows clients and servers that use a newer version of the RDP protocol, including Windows 7 and 8 desktops and Windows Server 2012.