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Product Information

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux family is one of the industry's most comprehensive suite of certified Linux operating systems - designed for everything from workstations to mission-critical enterprise computing and is certified by top enterprise software vendors. It delivers the highest levels of performance and value - combining the innovation of open source technology with the stability of a true enterprise-class platform. Now you can deploy Linux in the most demanding environments, from the desktop to the datacenter.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux products are delivered through an annual subscription with one year of support services and access to Red Hat Enterprise Network. This ensures your systems stay reliable and secure.

The latest version, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, introduces updated core technologies. From the kernel to the application infrastructure to the development toolchain, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is designed to meet the needs of the coming generations of hardware and software technologies.

Documents & Downloads

New Features

What's new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6.2

• Manage system resources - service providers and businesses delivering hosted applications and services can now set maximums for CPU time associated with a given application, business process or virtual machine.
• High Availability (HA) Add-On - when virtualising RHEL in VMware, the applications can now be utilised for HA Add-Ons. This also includes full support for use of GFS2 shared storage file system by the virtual machines.
• Storage and file system - features full support of iSCSI extensions for RDMA (with High Performance Network Add-On) and file system enhancements that include delayed meta data logging, asynchronous and parallel file system writes, as well as support for multiple active instances of Samba.
• Identity management - new tools help to quickly install, configure and manage server authentication and authorisation in Linux/Unix enterprise environments, while still providing optional Active Directory integration.
• Performance - enhanced performance with emphasis on accelerating I/O such as network traffic steering to improve network throughput by as much as 30 percent.
• Plus much more.

What's new in Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 6.1

• Performance improvements - features improvements in system reliability, scalability and performance, coupled with support for upcoming system hardware
• Configuration options for storage - additional configuration options for advanced storage configurations with improvements in FCoE, Datacenter Bridging and iSCSI offload, which allow networked storage to deliver the quality of service commonly associated with directly connected storage
• Better enterprise support - new technologies that enable smoother enterprise deployments and tighter integration with heterogeneous systems
• New developer tools - integrated developer tools that provide the ability to write, debug, profile and deploy applications without leaving the graphical environment
• High Availability (HA) Add-On - support for automatic failover for virtual machines and applications using the Red Hat High Availability Add-On
• Network traffic enhancements - improvements to network traffic processing to leverage multi-processor servers that are getting increasingly common
• Red Hat Enterprise Identity (IPA) - a technology preview of Red Hat Enterprise IPA, based on the open source FreeIPA project
• Plus much more.

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Server

Efficiency, scalability and reliability

• New file system support - EXT4-16TB - ext4 is faster, more robust and scales to 16 TB
• The scalable file system add-on contains the XFS file system, which scales to 100 TB
• Enhanced multi-core support with Completely Fair Scheduler (CFS)
• Full support for RAS features, including Intel Machine Check Architecture
• Power management – active state reducing power consumption across the system including I/O

Resource management

• Uses Cgroups to allocate resources by user or application and provides fine grained resource management
• Improved networking capabilities include IPv6 support, support for tolerating partially corrupted packets, multiqueue networking and more

Designed-in Security

• Extensive SE Linux Policy library making security accessible
• Standardise system security information with OpenScap
• Enhanced centralised idenity control with SSSD (System Security Services Daemon)/OpenLDAP
• Enhanced VPN options with Openswan Ipsec that works with Cisco Ipsec

Improved applications and platforms

• Web infrastructure: includes Apache 2.2 which itself includes a range of new features, a major revision of Squid with IPv6 support and Memcached 1.4x for caching of dynamic web sites
• Java: includes the OpenJDK 6 - an open source implementation of Java Platform SE 6, Tomcat 6 for deploying Java web applications and close integration between Java and the RHEL core
• Development: includes the latest versions of Ruby, gcc, gcc libraries, gdb, TurboGear, PHP and Perl
• Databases: Postgre SQL, MySQL and SQLite have all been updaed with a range of improvements

Integrated virtualisation

• All RHEL features and system improvements apply to RHEL as a guest or host as the KVM hypervior is integrated into the kernel
• SR-IOV virtualises physical I/O card resources, primarily networking, allowing multiple guests to share a single physical resource
• Svirt – powered by SE Linux – protects guests from one another
• Windows WHQL certified drivers enables virtualised windows systems
• Control guest resources with Cgroups

RHEL is the best guest across hypervisors

• Support for Cisco's VN link - move Cisco networking drivers and networking
• Tickless kernel and other system improvements for predictable operations regardless of hypervisor
• Hardware independent debugging tools such as SystemTap

Enterprise manageability

• Workload Profiles installation options, including minimal install, to tailor OS to specific applications
• ABRT enhanced error reporting enabling customers ease of reporting errors directly to RHT
• Policy Kit allow administrators to assign users access to privileged operations without granting admin privileges
• Microsoft Interoperability – support Windows 2008 R2 active directory
• Smart Management Add-on provides manageability, monitoring and provisioning
• Standards-Based Linux Instrumentation for manageability (SBLIM) manages systems using Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM).

New in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Desktop

• OpenOffice 3 suite - supports import of Microsoft Office documents, supports the ODF 1.2 and more
• Email - (openchange MAPI client capability)
• NetworkManager - mobile network connection management
• Improved printing - simplified configuration and discovery and improved monitoring of ink and toner supply levels
• Cisco IPSEC client compatibility
• Smart Card support
• Encrypted disk (luks)
• XACE which prevents unauthorised communication between windows on the same desktop

Editions

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server is a versatile platform that can be deployed on physical systems, as a guest on the major hypervisors, or in the cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server includes a complete LAMP stack (Apache/Tomcat, PHP/Perl/Python, MySQL/PostgreSQL), file and print services (NFS, CIFS/SMB, CUPS), and authentication services (openldap, kerberos5).

Subscriptions are available with flexible guest entitlements of one, four, or unlimited guests per physical host.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM System z

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, deployed on IBM System z, provides flexibility, performance, and scalability for server consolidation or for mainframe reliability. Built on a decade-plus industry collaboration, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM System z brings Linux applications to the mainframe, and delivers efficient management for your Linux workloads.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for IBM POWER

Deploy applications with confidence using the advanced features in IBM Power Systems and the consistency and flexibility of the market-leading Linux operating platform. Standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux across your x86, Power, and Mainframe systems reduces complexity for operations and development — without compromising reliability. Applications can be responsive to business needs with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and support for the latest features in POWER7 and LPAR hardware partitioning.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Business Applications

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP Business Applications includes the entire software stack required for optimal operation of SAP applications, as well as enterprise-class service and support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop

Designed for task workers. Typically requires a limited set of applications. End user has limited administrative control over the system. System administrators need to be able to pre-configure and remotely manage consistent images across a large number of systems.

Primary applications in use are productivity applications like Firefox, Evolution/Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Planner/TaskJuggler. Primary services in use would be network file systems like SMB/CIFS, NFS, printing services, IM.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation

Workstations are designed for advanced Linux users. In addition to the tools provided in the Desktop variant, the Workstation variant supports a stand-alone development environment. End users are expected to have local super-user privileges or select super-user privileges.

Subscriptions

Red Hat Enterprise Linux products are delivered through an annual subscription with one year of support services and access to Red Hat Enterprise Network. This ensures your systems stay reliable and secure.

RHEL Subscription Options

• Basic Support Subscriptions: Web support, 2 business day response, unlimited incidents.
• Standard Support Subscriptions: Business Hours phone support, web support, unlimited incidents.
• Premium Subscriptions: 24x7 phone support, web support, unlimited incidents.

How to claim your subscription

To make sure you get your subscription benefits, you will need to take 2 to 3 steps.

• 1. Go to the Red Hat web site https://www.redhat.com/ (or direct to https://www.redhat.com/apps/user/login.html) and select the ACCOUNT option at the very top of the screen. If you do NOT already have an account then you will need to 'Become a member'. Users already registered may go direct to step 2. (There are two tabs under the 'red' heading strip. Ensure that REDHAT.COM is selected.)
• 2. Click on the 'Support & Docs' tab (or go direct to https://www.redhat.com/apps/support/ ). Complete the 'Activate an Entitlement' entry if not already activated.
• 3. Select the REDHAT NETWORK.COM tab just under the 'red' heading strip (or go direct to https://rhn.redhat.com/ ) - Sign In to RHN. Access will then be given to relevant upgrades etc.

Please note:
With multipack licences, subscriptions are all activated at the same time with a single subscription key. All subscriptions are activated at this one time regardless of when you choose to roll-out each licence, which may affect subscription length with staggered roll-outs.