Red Hat Enterprise 6.4 is now available

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 is now available

Today, Red Hat announced the general availability of the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4.

This release includes a broad set of updates to the existing feature set and provides rich new functionality in the areas of identity management, file system, virtualization, resource management, networks, storage, security, and end-user productivity tools.

We continue to work with our customers and partners as well as the open source community to deliver technology that is innovative yet stable. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 has been designed for optimized performance, stability, and scalability to cater to today’s diverse workloads running in physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Key new features and enhancements include:


Identity Management

  • System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) enhancements extend the interoperability experience with Microsoft Active Directory by providing centralized identity access control for Linux/Unix clients in a heterogeneous environment.
  • Administrators can now manage Secure Shell (SSH) keys across multiple systems from a single server.
  • It is now possible to map user records to their associated SELinux records, making it easier to manage user access across platforms.
  • Administrators can assign priorities to servers so that identity lookup occurs in the defined order which can reduce network traffic. This provides IT with another tool to help meet Quality of Service (QoS) commitments or performance expectations.

File System

  • Red Hat has taken a lead role with its partners and the upstream community on the parallel Network File System (pNFS) industry standard, driving the addition of capabilities that allow database workloads to benefit from the advantages of pNFS.This functionality offers performance gains for I/O intensive workloads like database access. Using the first-to-market, fully supported pNFS (file layout) client — delivered in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 — customers can begin to plan and design next-generation, scalable file system solutions based on pNFS.

Virtualization

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 includes the Microsoft Hyper-V Linux drivers, which were recently accepted by the upstream Linux community, improving the overall performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux when running as a guest on Microsoft Hyper-V.
  • Installation support for the VMware and Hyper-V para-virtualization drivers enable easy deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest in these environments.
  • A new storage architecture for virtual environments (virtio-scsi) provides guests with industry-leading scalable access to the storage stack.

Resource Management

  • Enhancement to control groups (cgroups) delivers the ability to migrate multi-threaded applications without errors.
  • An optimized version of perf, the performance monitoring tool, is now available for the newer Intel processors.

Networking

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 introduces the Precision Time Protocol (PTP) as a feature in Technology Preview. This feature is hardware dependent and applies to a set of new devices. PTP is known for CPU efficiency, network bandwidth, and low administration effort. It provides clock synchronization across the network in the sub-microsecond range by eliminating network and equipment timing variability or “jitter.”
  • The Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) provides support for multi-homing communication. Multi-homing allows a single SCTP endpoint to support multiple IP addresses, which means that a session is more likely to survive a network failure. Red Hat Enterprise 6.4 implements the protocol’s “Quick Failover Algorithm” to reduce the amount of time it takes to migrate from a failed connection to an active connection.
  • NetworkManager now has a standard, easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI) for configuring and managing network interface controller (NIC) bonding and network bridges.

Storage

  • New system log features identify the mapping from logical block device name to physical device identifier – allowing an administrator to easily identify specific physical devices as needed.
  • New support for scalable snapshots and thinly-provisioned volumes in the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) allows storage pool capacity to be used as efficiently as possible. Thinly provisioned volumes consume storage space only when data has been written to them – and only as long as that data is still in use. Thin snapshot volumes allow many virtual devices to share the data blocks they hold in common.
  • The number of supported virtual tape drives has increased from 100 to 512.

Security

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 complies with Transport Layer Security (TLS) 1.1. The 1.1 version of TLS increases communication security and integrity. It has the ability to protect against cipher block chaining (CBC) attacks. Other enhancements to TLS include improved error handling and operations between networked nodes.
  • The Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) is a standardized suite of specifications used in facilitating security auditing for enterprise-class systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 now supports SCAP 1.2.

  • System administrators can now define the amount of time that must lapse before an account is considered inactive. This automates locking inactive accounts and closes the gap during which these accounts can be exploited.


Productivity Tools

  • Evolution now interoperates better with Microsoft Exchange. Productivity functions such as calendar support with alarm notification and meeting scheduling are improved.
  • Customers such as animation studios and graphic design houses now have support for the newer Wacom Intuos tablets.

We greatly appreciate the dedication and collaboration within the company and with our partners and community to develop and deliver the highest quality open source enterprise platform available today.

Sincerely,


The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Team

To read the Red Hat press release, please visit: www.redhat.com/about/news/press-archive/2013/2/red-hat-announces-general-availability-of-next-minor-release-of-red-hat-enterprise-linux-6

To access and download an evaluation copy for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4, please visit: https://access.redhat.com/downloads/

Please note that this requires an active account on the Red Hat customer portal, and the user must filter and navigate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and the architecture of interest (e.g., x86_64, IBM Power, IBM System z, etc.).

For access to the documentation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4 including the release notes, please visit: https://access.redhat.com/knowledge/docs/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/

For access to other supporting collateral within the Red Hat internal Products and Technologies portal, please visit (requires login): https://engineering.redhat.com/pnt/b-5887/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux_6