[rhelv6-beta-list] Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 Announcement

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Santiago) Beta releases discussion mailing-list rhelv6-beta-list at redhat.com
Tue Dec 6 18:11:52 UTC 2011


Today Red Hat announces the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux 6.2, which delivers to customers a second wave of feature 
enhancements and demonstrates the continued value that Red Hat delivers 
as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 lifecycle.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 delivers significant improvements in 
virtualization, resource management and high availability, and offers 
new features in storage and file system performance and identity 
management. The key benefits for organizations employing Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux 6.2 are higher levels of efficiency realized through 
resource management and performance optimization, along with enhanced 
business agility through additional security and flexibility for 
virtualized and clustered deployments.

Specifically, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2:

  * provides simplified management tools for storage, clusters, 
filesystems, and virtualized resources including capabilities for 
resource management, SLAs, and user identity;
  * improves performance out of the box for virtualized guests, storage, 
networked filesystems, and clusters;
  * delivers additional scalability across file systems and virtualized 
resources; and;
  * achieves critical security certifications required by large 
enterprises and government agencies.

These features and enhancements highlight Red Hat Enterprise Linux 
advantages as an operating system platform for the next generation 
enterprise.

Although there are dozens of enhancements and new features for Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux 6 being introduced with the 6.2 release, below are 
several notable ones.

Virtualization Optimizations
Workload consolidation demands doing everything possible to reduce the 
overhead costs of CPU consumption in hosting virtual guests. Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux 6.2 includes several networking optimizations that can 
reduce data copies and reduce context switching. Another initiative is 
to provide similar diagnostic capabilities as bare-metal for virtualized 
guests in pre-boot environments and for system backtracing capabilities. 
Further usability enhancements are included making it easier to dedicate 
both CPU and memory resources for performance optimization of high 
priority virtualized guests.

Resource Management
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 provides additional capabilities to manage 
system resources. For service providers or internal IT organization who 
deliver applications or hosted services via multi-tenant environments, 
maximums can be set for CPU time associated with a given application, 
business process or a virtual machine. This allows for more efficient 
management of SLAs and enables the ability to implement service 
priorities, similar to those associated with network Quality of Service 
(QoS).

High Availability
When an enterprise deploys its applications to run in a Red Hat 
Enterprise Linux 6.2 guest hosted by VMware, the container can now be 
configured for High Availability (HA). This also includes full support 
for use of GFS2 shared storage file system in the environment. The 
result is additional deployment flexibility for those customer who 
require HA within a portion of their virtualized environment, as well as 
full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the VMware hypervisor.

Storage and File System Performance
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 adds the capability for full support of 
iSCSI extension for RDMA. Now, the benefits of low latency and high 
throughput through a standard SAN implementation based on 10Gb Ethernet 
are available to even the most demanding storage environments. This 
allows developers to opt out of expensive Infiniband hardware or other 
dedicated interconnect fabrics. Other enhancements around file system 
(delayed meta data logging, asynchronous and parallel file system 
writes) and clustering (for large Samba deployments) also drive 
performance benefits.

Identity Management
Identity Management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 provides the 
administrative tools to quickly install, configure and manage server 
authentication and authorization in Linux/Unix enterprise environments, 
while still providing the option to interoperate with Microsoft Active 
Directory. This enables enterprises to manage Linux infrastructure 
easily and cost-effectively. Centralized identity management and 
host-based access control can reduce administrative overhead, 
streamlines provisioning and improves security.

Performance
Performance is key to all customers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 
continues to put an emphasis on accelerating I/O with features such as 
network traffic steering. As a result, numerous filesystem enhancements 
that reduce read-write times and boosts overall system utilization are 
delivered, and network throughput is improved by as much as 30 percent, 
in performance tests conducted by Red Hat.

Enterprises can confidently migrate to the latest multi-core technology 
with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. On the latest two-tier SAP SD standard 
application benchmark, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 achieved more than 
22,000 SAP SD benchmark users on a single system. On this same 
benchmark, the HP DL980 system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 fully 
utilized all 80 cores and 160 threads in the 8-processor system running 
MaxDB 7.8 and the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 
application. This is the largest Linux result submitted to SAP to-date. 
Results as of December 2, 2011, certification number 2011052.

We look forward to our customer feedback, and to the continued adoption 
of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the foundation for the next generation 
enterprise.

For more information about what’s new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, 
please visit: http://www.redhat.com/rhel/server/whats_new

For a detailed overview of the technical features and benefits, see this 
document:
http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/RHEL_6_2_features_benefits.pdf

To see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 press release look here:
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2011/first-anniversary-of-red-hat-enterprise-linux-6

For overall information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 please visit: 
http://www.redhat.com/rhel

Sincerely,

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux team




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