[rhelv6-beta-list] Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 GA Announcement

Thu Jun 21 18:22:29 UTC 2012

June 21, 2012

We are pleased to announce today general availability of the next minor 
release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3. 
Red Hat continues to deliver a predictable lifecycle of new product 
features and partner enhancements that customers rely on.  These 
innovations originate from many sources including Red Hat engineers, 
partners and customers themselves, as well as the open source 
communities in which we lead and participate.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 
6.3 provides enterprises with mature, stable technology backed up by our 
award-winning Global Support Services team.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux validates its position as a leading operating 
system platform - specifically within hybrid environments that require a 
combination of physical, virtual, and cloud architectures.  In these 
environments enterprises expect consistency, stability, yet deployment 
flexibility.  Features like secure disk wiping and live volume resizing 
of virtual guests demonstrate the value of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 
hybrid deployment patterns, and represent the confluence of key 
capabilities for security and storage resource management with next 
generation architectures like cloud and virtualization.

Also evident with minor releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are 
enhancements that take advantage of advancements from hardware OEMs. 
Examples include updated device drivers as well as compiler 
optimizations for the Intel Xeon E5 processor family.

Summarized below, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 includes a broad set of 
enhancements and new features providing rich functionality - 
particularly in the areas of developer tools, virtualization, security, 
scalability, file systems, and storage.

Developer Tools
---------------
Customers can develop and test with the latest version of open source 
Java with the introduction of OpenJDK 7.  This is in addition to the 
support of OpenJDK 6 that already exists in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. 
  These new capabilities along with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 
developer toolset (updated GCC), performance optimization, thread 
programming and NUMA will be described at Red Hat Developer Day in 
Boston on June 26th, 2012.  For more information, please visit:
http://www.redhat.com/summit/developerday/index.html

Virtualization
--------------
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 allows for smooth migration to a 
virtualized environment with the help of new Virt-P2V tools that can 
easily convert a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Microsoft Windows system 
running on physical hardware to run as a KVM guest.

Security
--------
Outstanding security and compliance is realized with Red Hat Enterprise 
Linux 6.3, including a more robust mechanism to protect data associated 
with defunct virtual machines.  Greater compliance to Payment Card 
Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) is realized as a result of 
the method by which virtual disk images are securely wiped.

Scalability
-----------
The maximum number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs) per guest has been increased 
from 64 to 160.  This is significantly higher than the 32 vCPU per guest 
limit for VMware ESX 5.0.  The maximum supported memory configuration 
for KVM guests has also been increased from 512GB to 2TB.

File Systems
------------
File system improvements include O_DIRECT support in FUSE (File System 
in User Space). This enhancement improves performance by reducing CPU 
cycles for file reads and writes.

Storage
-------
The Logical Volume Manager (LVM) now provides support for RAID levels 4, 
5, and 6.  This simplifies overall storage administration by 
consolidating all management functions, such as creating and resizing 
volumes, deploying RAID, and taking snapshots, into a single interface.

Subscription Management
-----------------------
Also with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, customers will use Red Hat 
Subscription Management by default, as an enhanced subscription 
management capability using X.509 certificates.  This will allow 
customers to effectively manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions 
locally and report on subscription distribution and utilization.  This 
approach will help facilitate compliance, upgrades, and long-term 
planning.  Customers will register their systems using Red Hat 
Subscription Manager to the award-winning Red Hat Customer Portal, or to 
an instance of Subscription Asset Manager (SAM), which is included with 
a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription at no cost.  Customers who wish 
to continue to manage their systems using Red Hat Network (RHN) Classic 
(also known as RHN Hosted) or with RHN Satellite will be able to do so 
or can choose to migrate to Red Hat Subscription Management.  More 
detailed announcements about subscription management will be forthcoming.

To read the Red Hat news blog, please visit: 
http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/6/red-hat-enterprise-linux-63-globally-available

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, please visit: 
http://www.redhat.com/resourcelibrary/articles/whats-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-6.3 
  and: http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/server/

To access and download an evaluation copy for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 
6.3, please visit: https://access.redhat.com/downloads/

For access to the documentation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 
including the release notes, please visit: 
https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/

Sincerely,

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux team