Announcing the Beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1

We’re pleased to announce the availability of the release of Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 9.1 Beta. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a flexible and stable foundation to support hybrid cloud innovation. Deploy applications and critical workloads faster with a consistent experience across physical, virtual, private, public cloud, and edge deployments.

What's new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 Beta?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 Beta brings new features and enhancements that deliver a more secure and consistent foundation for an open hybrid cloud environment with the ability to deliver workloads, applications, and services faster with less effort across various environments.

Accelerate application development

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 Beta provides developers with enhancements to application streams, bringing new compilers, runtime languages, databases, and web servers. Further improvements in this release include:

• Ruby 3.1 includes a new JIT compiler, a new debugger, improvements to IRB, better error messages, new hash syntax, and many other improvements.
• Maven 3.8 is a new version of the build automation tool used to build, publish, deploy, and manage projects, primarily Java™.
• .NET 7 brings many improvements in start-up and steady-state performance, as well as OpenTelemetry support.
• PHP 8.1 is a significant update of the PHP language. It contains many new features, including enums, read-only properties, first-class callable syntax, fibers, intersection types, and performance improvements.

Reduce risk and improve application availability

Enhanced security capabilities added to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 Beta help simplify how organizations manage security and compliance when deploying new systems or managing existing infrastructure. New features include:

• Organizations using identity management in Red Hat Enterprise Linux can now use new Ansible® tooling to configure smart card authentication across their entire topology.
• Organizations can now access Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems using identities stored in an external source (such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, and more).
• Classified agencies and ISVs can better implement multilevel security (MLS) to match their information security classification needs with improved documentation.
• A security administrator can take advantage of new attestation of the measured boot to remotely verify the integrity of their operating system’s boot environment.

Make it easier to automate and standardize systems

Automation and management capabilities in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 Beta continue to make it easier for organizations to automate manual tasks, standardize deployments, and simplify the day-to-day administration of systems. New capabilities include:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console

  • View and manage system-wide crypto policies for consistency and risk reduction from existing and future attacks.
  • Label and optionally encrypt and obfuscate specific data in sosreports generated in the web console. Plus, users can now view a list of previous reports.
  • Download Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation media when creating a new virtual machine within the web console.
  • Edit custom firewall services, including changing/adding port numbers and updating descriptions.

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles

  • The Microsoft SQL system role introduces support for Always On availability groups with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability Add-on. The role can configure synchronous clusters (up to 5 nodes in SQL Server 2019) to scale read performance and includes support for configuration-only replicas that can be used to reduce cluster licensing costs.
  • The storage system role now has support for thinly-provisioned volumes, adding and removing disks from storage pools, and the ability to create and attach cache volumes to existing volumes.
  • The firewall system role can optionally reset the firewall configuration to system defaults to help with consistent configurations. Plus, this role will now gather firewall facts that are exported as Ansible variables, and interfaces can be added to a zone by specifying a PCI device ID.
  • The network system role now supports network configurations using the NMState API, configuring policy-based routing, and configuring IP over Infiniband connections.

For more information, see:
- What’s New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 Beta blog
- Release Notes
- Product documentation
- Red Hat customers can directly access Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 Beta from the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product page.
- Learn more in the introduction to the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Beta experience article.