Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta Now Available 

We are pleased to announce the beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6, the latest version of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta includes enhancements to both security and stability as well as:

• Increased system performance
• An improved system administration experience
• Enhancements to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a virtual guest

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 offers a stable, proven and predictable platform, balancing the enterprise need to maintain a reliable and secure platform for mission critical workloads with the flexibility to adapt to changing business needs. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta answers this need, providing enhanced functionality that allows organizations to easily build and manage large, complex IT infrastructure for deployment across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta delivers a variety of improvements that provide increased system performance across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. These optimizations and tuning improvements include:

• Out-of-the-box support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) to deliver low-latency, high bandwidth network connectivity.
• A new socket polling implementation that reduces network latency and jitter.
• Kernel locking improvements to allow for increased CPU utilization on large systems.
• Support for additional 40GbE network adapters.

Organizations that build large, complex environments can benefit from enhancements that provide a better system administration experience. These include:

• Full support for Load Balancer technology like haproxy and keepalived
• Improved manageability of resource lists in large, high availability configurations
• The addition of Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), a framework and set of services supporting system level performance monitoring and management in distributed environments

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta also provides enhancements to running Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a virtual guest, upholding Red Hat’s commitment to refining the overall virtualization experience.  Virtualization updates in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 Beta include support for a host to feed randomness to a virtual machine, increasing security for cryptographic applications, multi-queue performance improvements for guest network and storage throughput when running Red Hat Enterprse Linux 6.6 Beta on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 host, and more.