We are pleased to announce today general availability of the next minor release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 – Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3.  Red Hat continues to deliver a predictable life cycle of new product features and partner enhancements that customers rely on.  These innovations originate from many sources including Red Hat engineers, partners and customers themselves, as well as the open source communities in which we lead and participate.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 provides enterprises with mature, stable technology backed up by our award-winning Global Support Services team.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux validates its position as a leading operating system platform – specifically within hybrid environments that require a combination of physical, virtual, and cloud architectures.  In these environments enterprises expect consistency, stability, yet deployment flexibility.  Features like secure disk wiping and live volume resizing of virtual guests demonstrate the value of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for hybrid deployment patterns, and represent the confluence of key capabilities for security and storage resource management with next generation architectures like cloud and virtualization.

Also evident with minor releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are enhancements that take advantage of advancements from hardware OEMs.  Examples include updated device drivers as well as compiler optimizations for the Intel Xeon E5 processor family.

Summarized below, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 includes a broad set of enhancements and new features providing rich functionality – particularly in the areas of developer tools, virtualization, security, scalability, file systems, and storage.

Developer Tools
Customers can develop and test with the latest version of open source Java with the introduction of OpenJDK 7.  This is in addition to the support of OpenJDK 6 that already exists in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.  These new capabilities along with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux developer toolset (updated GCC), performance optimization, thread programming and NUMA will be described at Red Hat Developer Day in Boston on June 26th, 2012.  For more information, please visit: http://www.redhat.com/summit/developerday/index.html

Virtualization
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 allows for smooth migration to a virtualized environment with the help of new Virt-P2V tools that can easily convert a Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Microsoft Windows system running on physical hardware to run as a KVM guest.

Security
Outstanding security and compliance is realized with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, including a more robust mechanism to protect data associated with defunct virtual machines.  Greater compliance to Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards (PCI-DSS) is realized as a result of the method by which virtual disk images are securely wiped.

Scalability
The maximum number of virtual CPUs (vCPUs) per guest has been increased from 64 to 160.  This is significantly higher than the 32 vCPU per guest limit for VMware ESX 5.0.  The maximum supported memory configuration for KVM guests has also been increased from 512GB to 2TB.

File Systems
File system improvements include O_DIRECT support in FUSE (File System in User Space). This enhancement improves performance by reducing CPU cycles for file reads and writes.

Storage
The Logical Volume Manager (LVM) now provides support for RAID levels 4, 5, and 6.  This simplifies overall storage administration by consolidating all management functions, such as creating and resizing volumes, deploying RAID, and taking snapshots, into a single interface.

Subscription Management
Also with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, customers will use Red Hat Subscription Management by default, as an enhanced subscription management capability using X.509 certificates.  This will allow customers to effectively manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions locally and report on subscription distribution and utilization.  This approach will help facilitate compliance, upgrades, and long-term planning.  Customers will register their systems using Red Hat Subscription Manager to the award-winning Red Hat Customer Portal, or to an instance of Subscription Asset Manager (SAM), which is included with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription at no cost.  Customers who wish to continue to manage their systems using Red Hat Network (RHN) Classic (also known as RHN Hosted) or with RHN Satellite will be able to do so or can choose to migrate to Red Hat Subscription Management.  More detailed announcements about subscription management will be forthcoming.

To read the Red Hat news blog, please visit: http://www.redhat.com/about/news/archive/2012/6/red-hat-enterprise-linux-63-globally-available

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, please visit: http://www.redhat.com/resourcelibrary/articles/whats-new-red-hat-enterprise-linux-6.3  and: http://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/server/

Sincerely,

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux team