[rhelv6-announce] Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 Beta is now available

[Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Santiago) announcement mailing-list]

Today, Red Hat announced the beta availability of the next minor
release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4.

This release includes a broad set of updates to the existing feature
set and provides rich new functionality in the areas of identity
management, file system, virtualization, management, storage and
productivity tools.

We continue to work with our customers and partners as well as the open
source community to deliver technology that is tested and stable - even
during the beta phase of development.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 has
been designed for optimized performance, stability and flexibility to
cater to today's diverse workloads running in physical, virtual and
cloud environments.

Key new features and enhancements include:

Identity Management

*  System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) enhancements extend the
    interoperability experience with Microsoft Active Directory by
    providing centralized identity access control for Linux/Unix clients
    in a heterogeneous environment.

File System

*  pNFS (Parallel NFS) client (file layout only) remains in technology
    preview, however, now delivers performance improvements with the
    addition of Direct I/O for faster data access.  This drives
    particular performance benefits for I/O intensive use cases such as
    database workloads.

Virtualization

*  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 now includes the Microsoft Hyper-V Linux
    drivers, which were recently accepted by the upstream Linux
    community, improving the overall performance of Red Hat Enterprise
    Linux 6 as a guest on Microsoft Hyper-V.

*  Installation support for the VMware and Hyper-V para-virtualization
    drivers enabling easy deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a
    guest in these environments.

*  KVM virtualization virtio-scsi support, a new industry storage
    architecture, provides industry leading storage stack scalability.

Management

*  Ability to use swap over NFS allows large disk-less server farms to
    function without locally backed storage. This is beneficial to
    hosting providers who want to manage their storage environments
    centrally.

*  Enhancement in c-groups (control groups) delivers the ability to
    migrate multi-threaded applications without errors.

*  Optimized performance monitoring tool, perf tool, for the latest
    Intel processors.

Storage

*  New system log features identify the mapping from logical block
    device name to physical device identifier – allowing an
    administrator to easily identify specific physical devices as needed.

Productivity Tools

*  Microsoft interoperability improvements with Microsoft Exchange in
    Evolution. Productivity functions, such as calendar support with
    alarm notification and meeting scheduling is improved.

*  Customers such as animation studios and graphic design houses now
    have support for the newer Wacom tablets.

We greatly appreciate the dedication and collaboration within the
company and with our community to develop and deliver the highest
quality open source enterprise platform available today.

Sincerely,

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Team


To read the Red Hat news blog, please visit:

 
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/12/latest-beta-available-of-red-hat-enterprise-linux-6-now-available

To access and download an evaluation copy for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
6.4, please visit:

     https://rhn.redhat.com/rhn/software/channels/Beta.do

Please note that this requires an active account on the Red Hat
customer portal, and the user must filter and navigate to Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 6 and the architecture of interest (e.g., x86_64,
Power, System Z, etc.).

For access to the documentation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4
including the release notes, please visit:

     https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Team