Today, we are pleased to announce the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 Beta continues Red Hat’s drive to provide enterprises with a more secure, stable platform for innovation, whether it’s Internet-of-Things (IoT) deployments or Linux container-based applications. The beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 includes enhancements and new features around performance, platform security, reliability and new types of enterprise technology deployments, including Linux container-based applications and IoT.

Performance

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 Beta provides a number of performance enhancements, tweaks and new features - including significant improvements to networking. The latter is achieved via the inclusion of lightweight tunnels and an enhanced bulk packet memory allocator. Lightweight tunnels enable guest instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to benefit from improved datapath efficiency, scalability, flexibility, and security features, while enhancements to the bulk network packet memory allocator improves performance for both 40 and 100 Gb networking interfaces. Additional performance enhancements and features include:

Support for Non-Volatile Dual In-line Memory Modules (NVDIMMs), which can be mounted as persistent memory block devices with either XFS or ext4 file systems. Combined with support for Red Hat Enterprise LInux installation to persistent memory targets, users are now able to take full advantage of direct access to low-latency, high performance storage.

The ability for parallel NFS (pNFS) clients to directly mount SCSI volumes shared by pNFS servers - allowing for high speed direct data transfer while using traditional NFS semantics.

Platform Security

Providing a safer and more secure platform for mission-critical deployments remains a key concept for the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 Beta introduces several new and enhanced features for improved security, including:

Smart card authentication with Active Directory, enabling users to authenticate with smart cards directly against an Active Directory server.

Upgrades to SELinux tools - allowing for faster policy creation and improved overall ease of use.

Support for the OpenSCAP workbench - allowing for the modification of SCAP policies via a graphical tool, which can then be verified and applied using OpenSCAP to enforce compliance and policies on a given system.

The addition of Media Access Control security (MACSec) v2 to enable encryption between Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and virtual machines. The encryption can also be offloaded to capable hardware, lowering the overhead associated with higher-level protocol encryption.

Reliability

To continue to provide a reliable and proven platform for mission-critical deployments, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 Beta provides several new reliability and redundancy features, highlighted by the ability to use pacemaker when creating and maintaining multi-site clusters across geo-locations. This enables customers to cut the time and costs associated with custom multi-site disaster recovery solutions with a fully integrated and easy-to-use solution within Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Other new and enhanced reliability and redundancy features include:

Full support for High Availability Add-On on IBM z Systems.

The capability for users to dynamically configure RAID devices via RAID Takeover, making it easier to transform simple volumes into a highly protected software-defined RAID configuration by adding more disks to a given system.

Linux Containers

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 Beta aims to streamline the lifecycle of containerized and cloud-native applications, from development to deployment with new and enhanced container-centric features, including:

The first container signing implementation that is capable of associating multiple signatures per image layer via the Technology Preview of the Atomic CLI, which can be used to sign and verify container signatures. This enables customers to verify the provenance of both their containers and the layers comprising each container.

The availability of both the Identity Management (IdM) client and server services as container images via the Red Hat Container Registry.

Internet of Things

As a powerful platform upon which to run enterprise-scale IoT implementations, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 Beta introduces two key features to help power these deployments:

Support for connections to low-cost integrated devices via Bluetooth LE (Low Energy), an extension of the Bluetooth standard designed for low power devices like IoT sensors.

The ability for customers to embed Red Hat Enterprise Linux into high-end industrial controllers via support for the controller area network (CAN) bus.

To review the full list of new features and capabilities within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 beta, please visit https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.3 beta is now available to all customers with an active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription.