Open source software firm Red Hat has released new version of its Linux operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux( RHEL) 6.3 tweaking several features.
The new features in the Enterprise Linux 6.3 includes enhanced functionality in the areas of developer tools, virtualisation, security, scalability, file systems, and storage.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 includes updated device drivers for a multitude of peripherals and also various features like compiler optimisation for the Intel Xeon E5 processor family.
The new RHEL supports OpenJDK 7, an Oracle-approved open-source Java Standard Edition (SE) that allows customers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 to develop and test with the latest version of open source Java.
Red Hat’s new release includes Virt-P2V tools that converts a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Microsoft Windows system running on physical hardware to run as KVM guests.
Users can now use two-factor authentication for securely accessing their Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. The 6.3 version also includes advanced encryption capabilities so data blocks can be encrypted in parallel by taking advantage of underlying multi-processor capabilities.
The encryption process is supported by the introduction of AES-CTR (Advanced Encryption Standard Counter Mode) cipher for OpenSSH. AES-CTR is well suited for high-speed networking environments.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 supports maximum number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs) per guest to 160 from 64. The maximum supported memory configuration for KVM guests has also been increased from 512GB to 2TB.
The Logical Volume Manager (LVM) now provides support for RAID levels 4, 5, and 6 to simplify overall storage administration by consolidating all management functions.
User can also now deploy RHEL as a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) istorage target server. Red Hat claims that this will provide higher levels of reliability and performance that you get with native Fibre Channel but at a significantly lower cost.
