Red Hat has announced yesterday the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 expands Red Hat’s vision of providing an enterprise platform that has the stability to free IT to take on major infrastructure challenges and the flexibility to handle future requirements, with an extensive partner and support ecosystem.
Security
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 gives a secure platform to build mission-critical services and applications. It provides integrated security functionality that combines ease-of-use and up-to-date security standards. The addition of a centralized certificate trust store enables standardized certificate access for security services. Also included are tools that meet leading security standards, including OpenSCAP 2.1, which implements the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s (NIST’s) Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) 1.2 standard.
Networking
Now, the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 fully supports sub-microsecond clock accuracy over the local area network (LAN) using the Precision Time Protocol (PTP). Precision time synchronization is a key enabler for delivering better performance for high-speed, low latency applications. System administrators now will have a more comprehensive view of network activity with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5. The improved networking capabilities enable sysadmins to inspect IGMP (Internet Group Management Protocol) data to list multicast router ports, multicast groups with active subscribers and their associated interfaces, all of which are important to many modern networking scenarios, including streaming media.
Virtualization
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 has improved the overall virtualization experience and includes several improvements in virtualized environments. Sysadmins can now dynamically enable or disable virtual processors (vCPUs) in active guests to make it an ideal choice for elastic workloads. RHEL 6.5 now supports up to 4TB of memory on the KVM hypervisor and KVM hypervisor also integrates with GlusterFS volumes. It offers performance improvement when accessing Red Hat Storage or GlusterFS volumes.
Ease-of-Use
RHEL 6.5 enables users to deploy application images in containers created using Docker in their environment of choice: physical, virtual, or cloud.
Storage
RHEL 6.5 introduces support for NVM Express (NVMe)-based SSDs. The NVMe specification aims to standardize the interface for PCIe-based SSDs and its inclusion in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 positions the platform to support an expanding range of future NVMe-based devices. With RHEL 6.5, It is now possible to configure more than 255 LUNs connected to a single iSCSI target.
RHEL 6.5 comes with kernel 2.6.32-431. It is very stable and reliable operating for enterprise environments.
Source: Redhat News
