This article is more than 1 year old

Red Hat unleashes EL 7.2 beta on a waiting world

Better containers, storage, security and admin, apparently

Red Hat has offered up a beta of Enterprise Linux 7.2, touting security, storage management, and expanded container capabilities.

The container support the outfit highlights includes enhancements to its OverlayFS and user namespaces. The company says its aiming to support both the migration of existing apps to containers, and new microservices-style development work.

As the company had previously explained, the user namespace features available since version 3.8 of the Linux kernel fit nicely with a container approach.

Back in July, though, the company was still concerned that user namespaces need to “incubate” a while longer to make sure they offered the security needed for enterprise deployment.

There's a new Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) module that allows security profiles to be applied during installation.

Encryption at rest gets attention as well, with the beta giving users a chance to test out the binding of data to local networks, which provides centralised management of large-scale encryption.

Other security features in the beta include:

  • DNSSEC for DNS zones managed by Red Hat Identity Management; and
  • Federated identities, which gives users a single access credential.

For sysadmins, the company lists the following features:

  • Better processor allocation for tasks that require dedicated processor time, based on on-demand vmstat workers in the kernel;
  • Simpler network identity-based disk data security;
  • Vendor-agnostic RAID configuration and disk health querying via an enhanced libStorageMgmt API; and
  • A variety of network admin improvements including network connection tracking (conntrack-tools), better integration between NetworkManager and external systems; and a new web-based Performance Co-Pilot UI.

More from Red Hat here. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like