Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta Now Available

Updated -

Today marks an exciting milestone for Red Hat as we share news of the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. We are inviting Red Hat customers and partners, as well as members of the public, to provide feedback on what we believe is our most ambitious release to date. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to provide the underpinning for future application architectures while delivering the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed to deploy across bare metal, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructures.

Based on Fedora 19 and the upstream Linux 3.10 kernel, the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 adds value to new and existing IT projects across industries by adding key capabilities to improve critical, but often cumbersome, IT tasks, such as virtualization and storage, while offering a clear pathway to the open hybrid cloud.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta showcases hundreds of new features and enhancements, including:

  • Linux Containers: The use of containers enables applications to be created and deployed in isolated environments with allocated resources and permissions.
  • Performance Management: Using built in tools, performance can be optimized out of the box.
  • Physical and Hosted In-place Upgrades: In-place upgrades for common server deployment types are now supported. Additionally, virtual-machine migration from a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 host to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 host is possible without virtual-machine modification or downtime.

  • File Systems: File systems continue to be a major focus of development and innovation:

    • XFS is now the default file system, supporting file systems up to 500TB.
    • Ext4 file systems are now supported to 50TB and include block sizes up to 1MB.
    • Btrfs file systems are now available to test.

  • Networking: Enhanced networking configuration and operation adds support for some of the latest networking standards, including:

    • 40Gb Ethernet support,
    • Improved channel bonding,
    • TCP performance improvements, and
    • Low latency socket poll support.

  • Storage: The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta expands support for enterprise level storage arrays, improves scalable storage stack for deployments that are less disk intensive, and improves storage management for heterogeneous storage environments.

  • Windows Interoperability: Bridge Windows™ and Linux infrastructure by integrating SAMBA 4.1 with existing Microsoft Active Directory domains or deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux Identity Management in a parallel trust zone with Active Directory.
  • Subsystem Management: Uniform management tools for networking, storage, file systems, performance, identities and security simplify configuration and administration. The OpenLMI framework enables the use of scripts and APIs to automate management.

Try Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta is available to Red Hat customers and partners, as well as members of the public. If you are interested in trying the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta, the following documents will help you get the proper subscriptions to get started:

After you obtain the proper installation media and subscriptions, the following documents will help you install and use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta:

  • Product
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux
  • Category
  • Learn more