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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 beta is ready for testing

Want a more up-to-date Red Hat Enterprise Linux but not ready to jump all the way the RHEL 7? Then this beta is for you.
Written by Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing Editor

It's great that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7 is out and ready to run. But, some companies aren't ready to jump to a major new release. For them, Red Hat will be releasing RHEL 6.6.

RHEL 6.6 has just been released in beta. It's clear who Red Hat means this release for when it states that RHEL 6.x stable "offers a proven and predictable platform, balancing the enterprise need to maintain a reliable and secure platform for mission critical workloads with the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta answers this need, providing enhanced functionality that allows organizations to easily build and manage large, complex IT infrastructure for deployment across physical, virtual, and cloud environments."

Specifically this upgrade to RHEL 6.x will come with:

  • Out-of-the-box support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to deliver low-latency, high bandwidth network connectivity.
  • A new socket polling implementation that reduces network latency and jitter.
  • Kernel locking improvements to allow for increased CPU utilization on large systems.
  • Support for additional 40GbE network adapters.
  • Better interoperability with Microsoft Active Directory (AD). 
  • Full support for Load Balancer technology like haproxy and keepalived.
  • Improved manageability of resource lists in large, high availability configurations
  • The addition of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), a framework and set of services supporting system-level performance monitoring and management in distributed environments.
  • Revalidation of Federal Information Processing Standards Publications (FIPS) 140 security certified programs, such as OpenSSL. 

This release also includes more support for running RHEL as a virtual guest. These include better cryptographic support for your secure applications and multi-queue performance improvements for guest network and storage. It also includes better guest support for Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization.

So, if you're an RHEL user, but you're not ready for the big jump to RHEL 7, RHEL 6.6 beta is now available in the Red Hat Customer Portal to all customers with an active RHEL subscription.

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