Red Hat, a provider of open-source-based platforms, announced the availability of the beta version of the seventh update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. This beta of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (version 5.7) contains a number of enhancements for enterprise management and virtualization performance. Also included are updates to the drivers and kernel to support Intel, AMD, POWER and IBM mainframe hardware updates.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux's capabilities are developed in the open source community and are based on the latest upstream Linux kernels. With both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 in the Production Phase 1 of their lifecycle, the features are first supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and then selectively backported to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, the vendor says.
The beta release adds new features specifically for the enterprise, such as security profile auditing and flexibility in enterprise directory integration. OpenSCAP improves security operations by verifying security configurations and vulnerability status across the infrastructure, as well as SSSD for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 authentication integration into the enterprise directory services.
In addition, the new release of Red Hat Linux adds virtualization performance optimizations, including KVM enhancements improve convergence speeds during live migration of virtual machines, and Xen hypervisor environment developments for smaller and faster boot images and more attached disks and serial interfaces.
The beta release also includes high availability on VMware platform with a native SOAP API fencing agent, as well as cluster fencing agents extensions supporting many of the latest hardware innovations, including Cisco UCS sub-organizations, for high-availability operations in a multi-tenancy environment.
More details are available at the Red Hat site.