Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8, the latest version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 delivers new capabilities and provides a stable and trusted platform for critical IT infrastructure. With nearly six years of field-proven success, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 has set the stage for the innovations of today, as Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to power not only existing workloads, but also the technologies of the future, from cloud-native applications to Linux containers.

With enhancements to security features and management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 remains a solid, proven base for modern enterprise IT operations. Jim Totton vice president and general manager, Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 includes a number of new and updated features to help organizations bolster platform security and enhance systems management/monitoring capabilities, including:

Enhanced Security, Authentication, and Interoperability

To enhance security for virtual private networks (VPNs), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 includes libreswan, an implementation of one of the most widely supported and standardized VPN protocols, which replaces openswan as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 VPN endpoint solution, giving Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 customers access to recent advances in VPN security.

Customers running the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 can see increased client-side performance and simpler management through the addition of new capabilities to the Identity Management client code (SSSD). Cached authentication lookup on the client reduces the unnecessary exchange of user credentials with Active Directory servers. Support for adcli simplifies the management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 systems interoperating with an Active Directory domain. In addition, SSSD now supports user authentication via smart cards, for both system login and related functions such as sudo.

Enhanced Management and Monitoring

The inclusion of Relax-and-Recover, a system archiving tool, provides a more streamlined system administration experience, enabling systems administrators to create local backups in an ISO format that can be centrally archived and replicated remotely for simplified disaster recovery operations. An enhanced yum tool simplifies the addition of packages, adding intelligence to the process of locating required packages to add/enable new platform features.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 provides increased visibility into storage usage and performance through dmstats, a program that displays and manages I/O statistics for user-defined regions of devices using the device-mapper driver.

Additional Enhancements and Updates

For customers with ever-increasing volumes of data, the Scalable File System Add-on for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 now supports xfs filesystem sizes up to 300TB.

Additionally, the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 includes the launch of an updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 base image which enables customers to migrate their traditional workloads into container-based applications – suitable for deployment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.

Today’s release also marks the transition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 into Production Phase 2, a phase which prioritizes ongoing stability and security features for critical platform deployments. More information on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux lifecycle can be found at https://access.redhat.com/support/policy/updates/errata.

Supporting Quote

Jim Totton, vice president and general manager, Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 continues to demonstrate Red Hat’s commitment to our customers’ many mission-critical deployments by delivering a proven foundation for the applications and systems that power the modern enterprise. With enhancements to security features and management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 remains a solid, proven base for modern enterprise IT operations."