Tame complexity with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5

For enterprise IT teams, complexity often grows faster than the time, budget and expertise on hand to manage them. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 (RHEL), the newest version of our industry-leading operating system, is for organizations and people wrestling with those growing complexities. RHEL 9.5 tames complexity across your IT organization with new features that reduce developer delays, amplify the abilities of sysadmins, protect essential workloads and simplify operational security.

Equip developers to ship faster

Nearly every organization struggles to give developers what they need to create the new applications and services their customers need. Too often, developers waste time hunting for their preferred tools, or settle for older versions, when they'd rather work with the latest packages coming from upstream. We've curated a set of new application streams for those developers that provide the latest tools, languages and database classes.

Java Developer Kit (JDK) 17  is now the default Java toolkit in RHEL 9. JDK 17 offers features that improve application performance, speed up code execution and smooth out your application scale-up.

JDK 17 is the new default, but JDK 11 is still available in RHEL 9.

Simpler container management with Podman 5.0

Podman 5.0, another addition to RHEL 9.5, enables single-command container management. Podman farm build lets developers build multiplatform images on remote machines using a single command. With this latest major version of the open source container engines, Podman machines boot up faster and can be reset more efficiently than ever. Taken together, these improvements reduce delays for developers and streamline deployment.

Check out this episode of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Presents for more on Podman 5.0:

Reinforce weary sysadmins

An IT organization can't operate efficiently when the system administrators and operators are bogged down with repetitive or excessively intricate tasks. Two RHEL 9.5 updates, a sudo system role and file management in the web console, support them by elevating their teammates and improving an already popular RHEL management tool.

Sudo system role to the rescue

The sudo command-line utility gives any IT practitioner some of the operational powers of a sysadmin, along with guardrails that protect against errors. But running sudo at scale can be challenging. That's why we've added the sudo system role to RHEL 9.5. A system role is an Ansible Content Collection that automates important RHEL tasks and processes. The sudo system role allows a sysadmin to properly configure consistent sudo instances across an enterprise IT environment from the command line. With it, a sysadmin can safely share responsibility for installations, network management and other repetitive work.

A more versatile web console

Web console now includes file management. This new RHEL web console add-on application provides file management capabilities that enable organizations to perform everyday file management tasks using the web console without using the command line. These tasks include browsing the file system, changing file/directory permissions, uploading and downloading files and creating directories. 

Run vital workloads with confidence

Every organization has some system that absolutely must perform. It may be an application where downtime would cost millions of dollars or a database that must be continuously and consistently available to applications running in the datacenter, on a public cloud or at the device edge. For many of our customers, these essentials run on SAP or Microsoft SQL Server with RHEL as the underlying platform. RHEL 9.5 increases reliability and improves performance for them.

The big improvement for SAP HANA users is faster failover. RHEL 9.5 handles index server crash restarts in scale-out and scale-up DBMS clusters, automatically switching over to the secondary SAP HANA node. We intend to backport this functionality to RHEL 9.4 and RHEL 8.10, too.

We're also introducing a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability cluster health check, a straightforward tool that spots potential issues before they can disrupt SAP HANA and S 4/HANA applications.

We've also built in best practices for running Microsoft SQL with custom SELinux policies to support configuring customized ports and dealing with auditing logs.

Mitigate risk with new security capabilities

System images are useful tools for scaling systems with consistency and security in mind. They let sysadmins hand off golden images for others to build upon and deploy anywhere without compromising the operating system.

RHEL 9.5 adds another layer of security with pre-hardened image configurations with image builder, which saves time and increases security for organizations. Our updated image builder simplifies cloud-based identity management and enhances hardware security with features that meet industry standards for privacy. With these improvements and increased support for confidential computing, our customers can safeguard sensitive data while running advanced AI workloads.

Try RHEL 9.5 now

Read the official documentation and release notes for RHEL 9.5 to learn more about our updates. To experience them yourself, download RHEL 9.5 today.

Additional Resources:

• RHEL 9.5 Product Download
• RHEL 9.5 Release Notes
• RHEL 9.5 Documentation
• RHEL 10 Public Beta Download
• RHEL 10 Public Beta Documentation
• RHEL 10 Public Beta Release Notes