Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 brings manageability, security and performance enhancements

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 offers improved development and deployment tools, enhanced interoperability and manageability, and additional security and performance features. As with all releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, these enhancements are delivered over a stable, secure, 10-year lifecycle backed by Red Hat’s award-winning global support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 delivers significant functionality improvements for heterogeneous operating system environments, particularly for infrastructure that uses Active Directory. By integrating the Common Internet File System (CIFS) with SSSD, users can now gain native access to Microsoft Windows file and print services without having to rely on winbind. Logical Volume Management (LVM) now includes additional OpenLMI-based hooks to manage volume groups and thinly provisioned volumes. This release also includes integrated client-side functionality to communicate with Ceph block storage.

Improvements to Identity Management (IdM) now provide the ability to implement strong one-time password (OTP) authentication through LDAP and Kerberos using software tokens (e.g. FreeOTP) and hardware tokens from leading third-party vendors. Additionally, the IdM access control framework has been enhanced for better control over read/write permissions and a new Certificate Authority (CA) management tool streamlines changes to CA certificates and trust chains.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 delivers new developer tools, including several related to Linux containers. The latest docker package is now included along with orchestration tooling through Kubernetes; also available are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 base images, which provide certified, stable foundations upon which to build enterprise-grade containerised applications. Beyond containers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 also includes OpenJDK 8, the latest version of the open source Java SE 8 platform.

From a performance perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 supports higher processor and memory limits, as well as additional features to improve the performance of applications and virtual machines, especially those running memory-intensive workloads. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 further enhances performance through the inclusion of an MCS locking mechanism to improve processor efficiency for large systems with sizable non-uniform memory access (NUMA) nodes.

Red Hat understands the needs of enterprise IT, from delivering applications faster through containerisation to running time-sensitive workloads to gaining efficiency by standardising across architectures. To better meet these requirements, the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 coincides with the launch of three specialised Red Hat Enterprise Linux offerings designed to address industry use cases or specific architectures. These are:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host is also generally available today, using the tools and frameworks as delivered by Project Atomic. Created specifically with container-based workloads in mind, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host offers a minimal-footprint, streamlined platform perfect for running Linux containers in an enterprise environment.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time is Red Hat’s real-time computing platform for deadline-oriented and time-sensitive applications. Using a specialised version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 kernel that has been tuned to deliver consistent low-latency response times, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Real Time retains the reliability, scalability, and performance of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Power, little endian brings Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.1 to enterprises using the IBM Power Systems platform with support for POWER8 on IBM Power Systems based on little endian. Running on POWER8 offers higher performance especially for big data applications through multi-threading, more cache and greater data bandwidth, while little endian mode removes an application portability barrier and allows datacenters running Power Systems to leverage Red Hat’s vast ecosystem of certified applications originally developed for x86 architecture. This also means that these certified applications can be more easily migrated between x86-based and POWER processor-based systems, giving customers the advantages of both architectures.