Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 goes live

Red Hat has announced the global availability of the next minor release of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3, BizTech2 reports.

The rich array of features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 originates from many sources including Red Hat engineers, partners and customers, as well as the open source community. Through the innovation harnessed through a strong and vibrant ecosystem, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.3 provides enterprises with mature, stable technology supported by its award-winning worldwide support organisation.

ZDNet reports the update includes the following new features:

* Developer tools: The new RHEL supports OpenJDK 7. This is the Oracle-approved open-source Java Standard Edition (SE).

* Virtualisation: New Virt-P2V tools that can be used to convert a RHEL or Microsoft Windows system running on physical hardware to run as Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) guests.

* Security: Users can now use two-factor authentication for securely accessing RHEL. It also includes advanced encryption capabilities so data blocks can be encrypted in parallel by taking advantage of underlying multi-processor capabilities. This is supported by the introduction of AES-CTR (Advanced Encryption Standard Counter Mode) cipher for OpenSSH, the secure connection network tool.

* Scalability: RHEL can now support up to 150 virtual CPUs (vCPUs) per guest. By comparison, Red Hat states that is “significantly higher than the 32 vCPU per guest limit for VMware ESX 5.0”. In addition, KVM virtual machine operating system guests can access up to 2TB of RAM.

* Storage: RHEL's Logical Volume Manager (LVM) now provides support for RAID levels 4, 5 and 6 to simplify overall storage administration by consolidating all management functions, such as creating and resizing volumes, deploying RAID and taking snapshots into a single interface.