Red Hat has gone public with the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.5. With predictable labels like "better scalability and manageability", there is also some real meat on the bones for those prepared to chew deeper.
Specifically, RHEL 6.5 will be designed to simplify the operation of mission-critical SAP applications by automating the optimal configuration of common SAP deployments.
Scalability at the administrative level is increased by changes made to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 beta kernel. Kernel dump files on large systems can now scale to multiple terabytes of data, and a new compression algorithm (LZO) speeds the creation of dump files, leading to reduced down time during crash dump generation and faster troubleshooting. An enhancement to the perf tool's tracing and testing commands also provides additional infrastructure event monitoring capabilities.
Networking enhancements included better analysis of multicast traffic by inspecting Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) data to list router ports and groups with active subscribers.
"The storage additions to the beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 deliver improved scalability, performance, and ease of use. Enterprise storage customers benefit from improved control and recovery in iSCSI and Fibre Channel Storage Area Network (SAN) environments. The performance and high-availability features of Multipath IO are available to a broader set of devices and multipath device automatic naming enhancements provide shorter, more convenient device names," said the company.
NOTE: The beta version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 also supports Intel's NVM Express driver, the industry standard specification for accessing PCI Express bus-based SSDs. In addition, FUSE-based file systems, like GlusterFS, can now use asynchronous IO for improved performance.
The maximum memory for Red Hat guests has increased to four terabytes, allowing guests to run large-scale workloads, and dynamic hot-add functionality for virtual CPUs enables customers to add compute resources to installed guests on-the-fly, reducing downtime.
