Testers Wanted: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta

We’re pleased to announce the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Ten years of inspiration, perspiration, and innovation have led to this, the next phase in realizing Red Hat’s vision for the open hybrid cloud and the future of enterprise computing.

With today’s announcement, we are inviting you - Red Hat customers, partners, and members of the public - to provide feedback on what we believe is our most ambitious release to date. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to provide the underpinning for future application architectures while delivering the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed to deploy across bare metal, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure.

Based on Fedora 19 and the upstream Linux 3.10 kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta showcases hundreds of new features and enhancements, including:

• Linux Containers - Enabling applications to be created and deployed in isolated environments with allocated resources and permissions.
• Performance Management - Using built in tools, you can optimize performance out-of-the-box.
• Physical and Hosted In-place Upgrades - In-place upgrades for common server deployment types are now supported. Additionally, virtual machine migration from a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 host to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 host is possible, without virtual machine modification or downtime.
• File Systems - File systems continue to be a major focus of development and innovation.
  • XFS is now the default file system, supporting file systems up to 500TB
  • ext4 file systems are now supported to 50TB and include block sizes up to 1MB
  • btrfs file systems are now available to test
• Networking - Enhanced networking configuration and operation. Added support for some of the latest networking standards, including:
  • 40Gb Ethernet support
  • Improved channel bonding
  • TCP performance improvements
  • Low latency socket poll support
• Storage - Expanded support for enterprise level storage arrays. Improved scalable storage stack for deployments that are less disk intensive. Improved storage management for heterogeneous storage environments.
• Windows Interoperability - Bridge Windows™ and Linux infrastructure by integrating SAMBA 4.1 with existing Microsoft Active Directory domains. Or, deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux Identity Management in a parallel trust zone with Active Directory.
• Subsystem Management - Simplified configuration and administration with uniform management tools for networking, storage, file systems, performance, identities and security. Leveraging the OpenLMI framework, enables use of scripts and APIs to automate management.

In the coming weeks, we’ll explore the inner workings of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta – what makes it tick and how it will make your organization tick better. But for now, read all about what the next generation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will entail here – better yet, try it out for yourself, and enter a drawing to win $500 by telling us what interests you most.