Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Beta now available

Today, Red Hat is pleased to announce the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4, the latest version of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 platform. Nearly three years into its lifecycle, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 continues to provide enterprises with a rich and stable foundation for both existing applications and a new generation of workloads and solutions.

The beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 includes a number of new and updated features to help organizations bolster security and compliance, better streamline management and automation, and realize an improved systems administration experience.

Security and Compliance
Year over year, security remains a top concern for IT professionals across industries. To help defend against the latest threats and provide a more secure platform for mission-critical deployments, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Beta introduces several new security features, including:

• Support for Network Bound Disk Encryption - tooling designed to reduce the management burden of disk encryption at scale.

• Enhancements to OpenSSL HTTP/2.0 - enabling several new Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol features to be implemented in OpenSSL, such as Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation (ALPN).

• Updated audit capabilities - designed to make it easier for administrators to filter the events logged by the audit system, gather more information from critical events, and to interpret large numbers of records.

Management and Automation
Increasingly complex IT environments, with footprints that span from bare metal to the cloud, means enterprise-grade management and automation can be seen as a necessity. In addition to the management capabilities of Red Hat Satellite and automation via Ansible Tower, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Beta is designed to make system configuration easier through the inclusion of Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles. Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles provides RHEL-specific supported content that relies on Ansible automation to help simplify the management and maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7-based deployments via a single set of tools.

Ease of Use
Maintaining an IT infrastructure for mission-critical applications can take a significant amount of time and effort. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Beta provides several new features to help systems administrators spend less time triaging events and issues and more time on what matters most. New features include:

• Additional enhancements to RAID Takeover - enabling system administrators to more easily change the RAID configuration and characteristics of their logical volumes while in-use.

• An update to Network Manager (version 1.8) introduces extended route options for firewall and route-table setup, MACsec for L2 VPNs, improved DNS, DHCP configuration visibility, and dynamic configuration of ethernet interface options.

• Support for new Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) client tools - the addition of client tools like pcp2influxdb, pcp-mpstat and pcp-pidstat allow for the export of performance metric values to influxdb, and retrospective analysis of mpstat and pidstat values. Additionally, new PCP Performance Metrics are available to a variety of Performance Co-Pilot analysis tools.

Availability and Additional Resources
Red Hat encourages customers with active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to download and preview Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Beta via the Red Hat Customer Portal and to provide feedback via Red Hat Bugzilla.

To review the full list of new features and capabilities within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Beta, please visit: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/

For the latest information on Red Hat's IT infrastructure products, offerings, and solutions - including greater insight into the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 - visit and subscribe to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Blog.