Just over four months after the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.2, Red Hat has made a beta of version 6.3 available. The developers have added Virt-P2V to the distribution; this is a new tool that enables physical Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems to be converted into virtual images that can then be run as KVM guests under RHEL or RHEV (Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation). In 6.3, it will also be possible to allocate up to 160 virtual processors to a guest system (an increase from the present limit of 64); in addition, KVM guests can now be configured with up to a maximum of 2TB of memory rather than 512GB.

Level 4, 5 and 6 RAID can now be set up via the Logical Volume Manager (LVM); like the new Thin Provisioning support via LVM, however, this feature is still considered a Technology Preview and is therefore excluded from Red Hat's support contract. The code to support operation as a Fibre Channel-over-Ethernet (FCoE) target is scheduled to lose its Technology Preview status with version 6.3 and will be fully supported. Apparently, the Btrfs filesystem will remain a Technology Preview; Oracle and Suse have officially supported the new filesystem in their enterprise distributions for several weeks although it is still considered experimental in the Linux kernel.

The developers typically take six to ten weeks from the beta to the release of a new RHEL version; therefore, RHEL 6.3 is likely to become available in June.

(ehe)