There's no question that Linux is a popular operating system, although it's far more popular on servers than it is on the desktop. If you're a fan of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you're in for a treat: The company announced the availability of RHEL 7 today, available for immediate download. The latest release includes a lot of changes to the core OS, many of which may force a learning curve for sysadmins.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host is a secure, minimal-footprint operating system optimized to run Linux containers. It couples the flexible, lightweight, and modular capabilities of Linux containers with the reliability and security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a reduced image size. To get Atomic Host up and running, an administrator must download an image of Atomic Host from Red Hat, create the VM using Red Hat's virt-manager tool, create a metadata ISO, attach init.iso to the virtual machine and start it, then enable the container orchestration technology Kubernetes and finally enable inter-container communications.
The most sizable change is that new filesystems will be XFS, instead of ext4, primarily because it can support up to 500TB filesystems, whereas ext4 is capped at 50TB. There's some question on whether the performance of XFS will be hampered on filesystems with lots of small files, and admins will need to learn how to manage the new filesystem, but ext4 is still available if required.
The latest release also focuses on virtualization, supporting Docker containers that promise to run at near bare-metal speed, while implementing the security controls of SELinux. It remains to be seen whether these containers will become extremely popular in the world, but it's a similar technology to Solaris Zones, which are extremely useful, so we suspect they will get some traction in the enterprise.
RHEL 7 also promises better Active Directory integration, a must-have for most organizations.
Have you tried the latest release, and if so, what are your thoughts on it? As a reminder, Neowin also has a vibrant user community with forums to match everyone's passions so if you want to continue the Linux discussion, head on over to the dedicated Linux/Unix Discussion and Support forum.
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