From rhelv6-announce at redhat.com Tue Dec 6 18:32:15 2011 From: rhelv6-announce at redhat.com (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Santiago) announcement mailing-list) Date: Tue, 06 Dec 2011 13:32:15 -0500 Subject: [rhelv6-announce] Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 Announcement Message-ID: <4EDE5FAF.5090507@redhat.com> Today Red Hat announces the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, which delivers to customers a second wave of feature enhancements and demonstrates the continued value that Red Hat delivers as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 lifecycle. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 delivers significant improvements in virtualization, resource management and high availability, and offers new features in storage and file system performance and identity management. The key benefits for organizations employing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 are higher levels of efficiency realized through resource management and performance optimization, along with enhanced business agility through additional security and flexibility for virtualized and clustered deployments. Specifically, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2: * provides simplified management tools for storage, clusters, filesystems, and virtualized resources including capabilities for resource management, SLAs, and user identity; * improves performance out of the box for virtualized guests, storage, networked filesystems, and clusters; * delivers additional scalability across file systems and virtualized resources; and; * achieves critical security certifications required by large enterprises and government agencies. These features and enhancements highlight Red Hat Enterprise Linux advantages as an operating system platform for the next generation enterprise. Although there are dozens of enhancements and new features for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 being introduced with the 6.2 release, below are several notable ones. Virtualization Optimizations Workload consolidation demands doing everything possible to reduce the overhead costs of CPU consumption in hosting virtual guests. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 includes several networking optimizations that can reduce data copies and reduce context switching. Another initiative is to provide similar diagnostic capabilities as bare-metal for virtualized guests in pre-boot environments and for system backtracing capabilities. Further usability enhancements are included making it easier to dedicate both CPU and memory resources for performance optimization of high priority virtualized guests. Resource Management Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 provides additional capabilities to manage system resources. For service providers or internal IT organization who deliver applications or hosted services via multi-tenant environments, maximums can be set for CPU time associated with a given application, business process or a virtual machine. This allows for more efficient management of SLAs and enables the ability to implement service priorities, similar to those associated with network Quality of Service (QoS). High Availability When an enterprise deploys its applications to run in a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 guest hosted by VMware, the container can now be configured for High Availability (HA). This also includes full support for use of GFS2 shared storage file system in the environment. The result is additional deployment flexibility for those customer who require HA within a portion of their virtualized environment, as well as full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the VMware hypervisor. Storage and File System Performance Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 adds the capability for full support of iSCSI extension for RDMA. Now, the benefits of low latency and high throughput through a standard SAN implementation based on 10Gb Ethernet are available to even the most demanding storage environments. This allows developers to opt out of expensive Infiniband hardware or other dedicated interconnect fabrics. Other enhancements around file system (delayed meta data logging, asynchronous and parallel file system writes) and clustering (for large Samba deployments) also drive performance benefits. Identity Management Identity Management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 provides the administrative tools to quickly install, configure and manage server authentication and authorization in Linux/Unix enterprise environments, while still providing the option to interoperate with Microsoft Active Directory. This enables enterprises to manage Linux infrastructure easily and cost-effectively. Centralized identity management and host-based access control can reduce administrative overhead, streamlines provisioning and improves security. Performance Performance is key to all customers and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 continues to put an emphasis on accelerating I/O with features such as network traffic steering. As a result, numerous filesystem enhancements that reduce read-write times and boosts overall system utilization are delivered, and network throughput is improved by as much as 30 percent, in performance tests conducted by Red Hat. Enterprises can confidently migrate to the latest multi-core technology with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. On the latest two-tier SAP SD standard application benchmark, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 achieved more than 22,000 SAP SD benchmark users on a single system. On this same benchmark, the HP DL980 system running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 fully utilized all 80 cores and 160 threads in the 8-processor system running MaxDB 7.8 and the SAP enhancement package 4 for the SAP ERP 6.0 application. This is the largest Linux result submitted to SAP to-date. Results as of December 2, 2011, certification number 2011052. We look forward to our customer feedback, and to the continued adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the foundation for the next generation enterprise. For more information about what?s new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, please visit: http://www.redhat.com/rhel/server/whats_new For a detailed overview of the technical features and benefits, see this document: http://www.redhat.com/f/pdf/RHEL_6_2_features_benefits.pdf To see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2 press release look here: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2011/first-anniversary-of-red-hat-enterprise-linux-6 For overall information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 please visit: http://www.redhat.com/rhel Sincerely, The Red Hat Enterprise Linux team From rhelv6-announce at redhat.com Fri Dec 16 18:57:54 2011 From: rhelv6-announce at redhat.com (Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Santiago) announcement mailing-list) Date: Fri, 16 Dec 2011 13:57:54 -0500 Subject: [rhelv6-announce] Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 Beta Announcement Message-ID: <4EEB94B2.3010007@redhat.com> Dear Red Hat Customers and Partners: Today, we are pleased to announce the availability of the Beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8. Red Hat?s proven, long lifecycle model considers customer needs and preferences while enabling a stable and feature-rich operating system environment. Through minor releases, such as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8, Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers experience significant and ongoing value from their subscriptions. This beta release includes a broad set of updates to the existing features and also provides new functionality, particularly in the areas of power and security management, and virtualization. Support for a range of new hardware is also included. Key functionality in this beta is as follows: Installation and Operation Management ------------------------------------- * 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 in lieu of achieving power savings. * The configuration of IP over Infiniband (IPoIB) adapters is now supported by the system installer, making installation of Infiniband adapters easier. * 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 and storage driver enhancements increase the number of devices supported. 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. 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 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 usability and stability of KVM hosts and Red Hat Enterprise Linux guests. * Xen enhancements provide improved guest performance, improved logging for debug, and virtual disk re-sizing while a guest is running. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.8 beta can be accessed at the following link: https://access.redhat.com/downloads/ The Release Notes can be accessed at the following link: https://docs.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5-Beta/html/5.8_Release_Notes/index.html Red Hat extends its continued appreciation to its partners and customers for their help in developing and delivering a high quality enterprise operating system platform for users worldwide. Sincerely, The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Team