Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6


Filesystems
* The new default file system, ext4, is faster, more robust, and scales to 16TB.
* The Scalable File System Add-On contains the XFS file system, which scales to 100TB.
* The Resilient Storage Add-On includes the high availability, clustered GFS2 file system.
* NFSv4 is significantly improved over NFSv3, and is backwards compatible.
* Fuse allows filesystems to run in user space allowing testing and development on newer fused-based filesystems (such as cloud filesystems).
Installation, Updates, and Deployment
* Anaconda supports installation of a “minimal platform” as a specific server installation, or as a strategy for reducing the number of software packages to increase security.
* Red Hat Network and Red Hat Network Satellite continue to provide management, provisioning, and monitoring for large deployments.
* Installation options have been reorganized into “workload profiles” so that each system installation will provide the right software for specific tasks.
* Dracut, a replacement for mkinitrd, minimizes the impact of underlying hardware changes, is more maintainable, and makes it easier to support third party drivers.
* The new yum history command provides information about yum transactions, and supports undo and redo of selected operations.
* Yum and RPM offer significantly improved performance.
* RPM signatures use the Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA256) for data verification and authentication, improving security.
* Storage devices can be designated for encryption at installation time, protecting user and system data. Key escrow allows recovery of lost keys.
* Standards Based Linux Instrumentation for Manageability (SBLIM) manages systems using Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM).
Microsoft Windows Support
* Windows WHQL-certified drivers enable virtualized Windows systems, and allow Microsoft customers to receive technical support for virtualized instances of Windows Server
Kernel-Based Virtualization
* The KVM hypervisor is fully integrated into the kernel, so all Red Hat Enterprise Linux system improvements benefit the virtualized environment.
* The application environment is consistent for physical and virtual systems.
* Deployment flexibility, provided by the ability to easily move guests between hosts, allows administrators to consolidate resources onto fewer machines during quiet times, or free up hardware for maintenance downtime.
Leverages Kernel Features
* Hardware abstraction enables applications to move from physical to virtualized environments independently of the underlying hardware.
* Increased scalability of CPUs and memory provides more guests per server.
* Block storage benefits from selectable I/O schedulers and support for asynchronous I/O.
* Cgroups and related CPU, memory, and networking resource controls provide the ability to reduce resource contention and improve overall system performance.
* Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability (RAS) features (e.g., hot add of processors and memory, machine check handling, and recovery from previously fatal errors) minimize downtime.
* Multicast bridging includes the first release of IGMP snooping (in IPv4) to build intelligent packet routing and enhance network efficiency.
* CPU affinity assigns guests to specific CPUs.
Java
* OpenJDK 6 is an open source implementation of the Java Platform Standard Edition (SE) 6 specification. It is TCK-certified based on the IcedTea project, and the implementation of a Java Web Browser plugin and Java web start removes the need for proprietary plugins.
* Tight integration of OpenJDK and Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes support for Java probes in SystemTap to enable better debugging for Java.
* Tomcat 6 is an open source and best-of-breed application server running on the Java platform. With support for Java Servlets and Java Server Pages (JSP), Tomcat provides a robust environment for developing and deploying dynamic web applications.
NEW FEATURES
* OpenOffice 3 suite
* Email – (openchange MAPI client capability)
* NetworkManager – mobile network connection management
* Cisco IPSEC client compatibility
* Smart Card support
* Encrypted disk (luks)