Red Hat Announces Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 General Availability and Subscription Asset Manager Beta Release

Red Hat is pleased to announce the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 operating system with new and improved functionality for enhanced performance, flexibility, and security. The release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 is part of the ongoing value delivered to customers during the recently-extended 10 year life cycle.

Also introduced today is the beta release for Subscription Asset Manager (SAM) that is available as part of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. SAM is an application for on-premise subscription management, asset inventorying and subscription usage reporting.

Our commitment to continuous innovation enables Red Hat Enterprise Linux to remain a scalable and trusted datacenter platform accommodating mission-critical enterprise workloads in physical, virtual and cloud IT environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 runs on current hardware platforms to leverage the advanced capabilities of underlying hardware. Minor releases to Red Hat Enterprise Linux are delivered approximately twice a year as part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s 10 year life cycle.

Noteworthy enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 include:

Virtualization

• The spice-client package now adds support for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 hosts. These improvements also allow users to access their desktop virtual machines over a WAN connection in addition to the local network.
• KVM enhancements include improved guest boot times and improved clock and timer support. The KVM hypervisor has updated real time clock (RTC) support to improve the performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 guests on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 KVM hosts.
• Additional KVM improvements increase the manageability and stability of KVM hosts and Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests. Many of these enhancements are in support of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0.
• Xen enhancements provide improved guest performance, improved logging for debug, and virtual disk re-sizing while a guest is running.

Hardware Support and Streamlined Installation

• Support for Power Management Quality of Service (QoS) provides automatic power management at the device level for managing latency and throughput based on QoS needs. During critical production windows, system administrators can enforce a high-performance, low-latency mode.
• New iotop support enables the monitoring of I/O resources, such as storage devices, at the process level, providing insight into potential performance issues.
• PCI-e 3.0 enablement provides support for new and emerging PCI-e 3.0 adapters.
• Network, storage and graphic driver enhancements for recent hardware.
• The configuration of IP over Infiniband (IPoIB) adapters is now supported by the system installer, making installation of Infiniband adapters easier.

Security Management

• OpenSCAP (Open Security Content Automation Protocol) support is now compliant with the SCAP 1.1 (Security Content Automation Protocol) specification, the most recent standard framework defined by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) for creating a standardized approach for maintaining secure systems.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 has been tested to the United States Government Configuration Board (USGCB) baseline and now meets the USGCB recommendations for government agencies following USGCB guidance for secure configuration policies.

We appreciate the support from our hardware partners, ISV ecosystem and the open source community that have all contributed to the successful introduction of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8.

Please visit:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 release notes

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 year life cycle

SAM Get Started Guide and beta download