Red Hat may be planning on being the leading private cloud company, but that doesn’t mean it’s giving up its Linux leadership. On Aug. 1, the Raleigh, N.C.-based company announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.4, the latest version of its flagship enterprise Linux distribution.
Here are its latest features:
Security
- Updated audit capabilities to help simplify how administrators filter the events logged by the audit system, gather more information from critical events, and interpret large numbers of records.
- USB Guard, which is a Linux software framework that protects your servers from rogue USB devices, is integrated into RHEL.
- Enhanced container security functionality, with full support for using SELinux with OverlayFS to secure the underlying file system and the ability to use docker and use namespaces together for fine-grained access control.
- Red Hat will no longer use by default deprecated insecure OpenSSH algorithms and protocols such as arcfour, SHA-1-based key exchange algorithms, and blowfish-cbc
Performance
Today’s business applications require more bandwidth and increased storage, placing a performance strain on traditional operating systems and hardware. RHEL 7.4’s new features will improve both networking and storage performance. It’s new features include:
- Support for NVMe Over Fabric helps provide customers with increased flexibility and reduced overhead when accessing high-performance Non-Volatile Memory (NVMe)storage devices on both Ethernet or Infiniband fabric infrastructures. NVMe is a communications interface/protocol developed specially for low-latency Solid-State Drives (SSD)s. By being able to handle up to 65,536 data transfer queues, it’s great for speeding servers up that deal with multiple simultaneous disk I/O requests.
- General public cloud enhancements by decreasing boot times to better enable mission-critical applications to start sooner. It also now supports Amazon Web Services (AWS)‘s Elastic Network Adapter (ENA) to enable new network capabilities.
Containers
RHEL 7.4 includes the latest version of RHEL Atomic Host. This is a purpose-built container host for secure and reliable containerized applications across hybrid clouds. Its new features include: