Red Hat Announces the Beta Release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2

Today, we are pleased to announce the availability of the beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2. This beta includes a broad set of updates to the existing feature set and also provides rich new functionality particularly in the areas of performance and scaling, identity management, high availability, advanced storage, and networking. As always, this beta delivers new hardware enablement made possible by our strong relationships with our strategic hardware partners. This beta release has been designed for optimized performance, scalability and reliability to cater to the diverse workloads running in physical, virtual and cloud environments.

The key benefits for organizations working with this beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 are operational efficiency realized through enterprise management and monitoring, along with enhanced business agility through additional support for virtualized and clustered deployments.
Key functionality in this beta for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 are as follows:

Performance and Scaling

• Kernel-level optimizations implemented in the process scheduler, networking, virtualization, and I/O subsystems.
• Faster creation of ext4 file systems and improved response times in XFS for certain workloads.
• Improved CPU controller scalability and enhanced resource management features to set processor utilization ceilings.

Identity Management

• Centralized identity management for the flexible management of users, roles, policies, and authentication services.
• New capabilities for the unification of Kerberos ticketing, DNS naming, user and group ids, and Linux systems policies into a single service.

High Availability

• Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 guests on VMware® hosts and comprehensive support for the GFS2 shared storage file system have been added to the High Availability Add-on Product, creating a more tightly integrated environment.
• Full support for the UDP-unicast protocol which reduces administration overhead, resulting in easier cluster deployment.

Advanced Storage

• World Wide Name (WWN), or World Wide Identifier (WWID), for storage devices making it easier to identify them during installation for users utilizing Storage Area Networks (SAN) and other advanced network topologies.
• Within production environments using infiniband – where high throughput and low latency are key requirements – Red Hat Enterprise Linux can now be purposed as an iSCSI initiator and storage server.

Networking

• Transmit Packet Steering (XPS) capabilities which improve network packet transmission throughput by 30%.

We look to our community and partners for feedback to ensure Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 is yet another high-quality release. The beta can be accessed here. The Release Notes can be accessed here. More detail on the new features can be accessed here.

To learn more about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, visit here, and for a technical deep-dive on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, visit here.