Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 Now Available

Red Hat announced the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 last week. Its update adds features that enhance the flexibility, security, and stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 environments, and includes a number of features incorporated from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Application interface consistency is maintained between Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 and prior updates, allowing systems to be updated easily without application re-certification.

Highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 include:

Hardware enablement

Support for new hardware from Red Hat partners encompassing processors, chipsets and new drivers for storage, networking, and graphics allows Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 deployments to benefit from new hardware platforms delivered in 2011, including Intel, AMD, POWER and IBM System z.

Virtualization improvements

Several virtualization enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 include improved migration performance for KVM, as well as several performance and scalability improvements for the Xen hypervisor.

SCAP support

OpenSCAP introduces support for the Security Content Automation Protocol, including a library and set of utilities, giving a standardized approach to validating Red Hat Enterprise Linux security.

Introducing Subscription Manager in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

First introduced to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 customers and now to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 customers, the new X.509 certificate-based Subscription Manager feature delivers Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions and software services in a flexible, scalable, and secure way. The Subscription Manager tracks subscriptions assigned to a system and configures software updates for better availability and faster update speeds.

Networking and storage enhancements

Added features for network bridging and LDAP features for autofs improve centralized management of user filesystems in an enterprise environment.

Availability Fencing

New fencing features boost cluster reliability in Cisco UCS system and VMware environments.

For more information about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, visit here. To access the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.7 release notes, visit here. Detailed technical notes are available here.