Today marks an exciting milestone for Red Hat as we share news of the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Since its introduction more than a decade ago, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become the world's leading enterprise Linux platform, and it has helped set industry standards for performance, capacity, capability and security. Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a leading force in enterprise datacenters; it spans nearly every industry and has advanced to deliver the original cloud operating system, powering many of the world's largest clouds.

With today's announcement, we are inviting Red Hat customers, partners, and members of the public to provide feedback on what we believe is our most ambitious release to date. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to provide the underpinning for future application architectures while and providing the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed to deploy across bare metal, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure.

Simply put, we believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 represents the future of IT. As hypervisors and cloud deployments become increasingly common and face integration with physical servers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 continues Red Hat's track record of cultivating a foundation upon which to build next-generation IT infrastructure, as no other Linux operating system combines the flexibility and stability needed to handle critical workloads across all environments with as extensive an ecosystem of solutions and support.

Based on Fedora 19 and the upstream Linux 3.10 kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will provide users with powerful new capabilities that streamline and automate installation and deployment, simplify management, and enhance ease-of-use, all while delivering the stability that enterprises have come to expect from Red Hat. This further solidifies Red Hat Enterprise Linux's place as the world's leading Linux platform and a standard for the enterprise of the future. Whether rolling out new applications, virtualizing environments or scaling the business with cloud, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 delivers the keystone to IT success.

The beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 adds value to new and existing IT projects across industries by adding key capabilities to improve critical but often cumbersome IT tasks like virtualization and storage while offering a clear pathway to the open hybrid cloud. Several key new and enhanced features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta include:

Linux Containers

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, applications can be created and deployed in isolated environments using Linux Container technology, such as Docker. System resources can be partitioned to each application container, providing each application with the appropriate resources and security isolation that they require – a key capability for enterprises seeking more agility and scalability within their infrastructure.

Performance Management

More than just benchmark results, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 helps customers optimize system performance out-of-the-box while helping reduce performance-related IT costs. In addition, users have the option to select the appropriate performance profile for their application that helps them to achieve optimal application results.

Physical and Hosted In-place Upgrades

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will offer an in-place upgrade feature for common server deployment types, allowing data centers to migrate existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 enables virtual machine migration from a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 host to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 host without virtual machine modification or downtime.

File Systems

File systems within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 continue to be a major focus of development and innovation, with enhancements to the ext4 and btrfs file systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will include XFS as the default file system, scaled to support file systems up to 500 TB. The ext4 file system adds scalability enhancements to increase the maximum standalone file system size from 16 TB to 50 TB, and gains support for block sizes of up to 1MB, considerably decreasing the time spent doing block allocation and reducing fragmentation. Btrfs, an emerging file system, will be available as a technology preview within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and includes integrated basic volume management, snapshot support, and checksum capability to validate full data and metadata integrity.

Networking

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 enhances networking configuration and operation and adds support for some of the latest networking standards. Performance improvements are delivered for network intensive applications with the availability of 40Gb Ethernet support, improved channel bonding, TCP performance improvements and low latency socket poll support.

Storage

Storage receives significant updates within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with support of very large scale storage configurations, including support for enterprise storage arrays. For more price-sensitive deployments, enhancements to Red Hat Enterprise Linux's scalable storage stack provide an alternative to expensive storage arrays. New capabilities in storage management simplify the management of heterogeneous storage environments.

Windows Interoperability

For datacenters where co-existence of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Microsoft Windows ServerTM is a requirement, interoperability capabilities have been expanded within Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Specifically, IT professionals can bridge Windows and Linux infrastructure by integrating Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 systems and SAMBA 4.1 with existing Microsoft Active Directory domains. Additionally, staff can choose to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux Identity Management in a parallel trust zone with Active Directory, allowing customers to leverage the investments they have already made.

Subsystem Management

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 simplifies configuration and administration with uniform management tools for networking, storage, file systems, performance, identities and security. It does this by delivering a Linux management framework that also interfaces to popular system management frameworks via OpenLMI. Through OpenLMI, system administrators can use scripting and APIs to automate management across multiple systems.

Today's beta announcement marks the beginning of our public journey to introduce our vision for the future of enterprise computing. This blog is the first in a series of posts that will share various aspects of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. We're excited to be starting this public journey, and look forward to sharing our vision with you starting with these key highlights of new and enhanced capabilities and continuing on our new Red Hat Enterprise Linux-focused blog, located at http://rhelblog.redhat.com/.

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Availability

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta is available to Red Hat customers, partners, and members of the public. If you are interested in trying the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta, we encourage you to download and install it, and tell us what interests you the most about the Beta. Access the beta here today.