Red Hat Delivers Force Multiplier for Enterprise IT with Enterprise Linux 8

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, the latest version of the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform and the foundation for Red Hat’s hybrid cloud portfolio. To help better address the IT challenges presented by shifting global dynamics, Red Hat believes that the operating system should do more than “just work;” it should help stabilize operations today with the capacity to support and embrace innovation later. 

 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, built for the interconnected nature of the hybrid cloud era, is designed to offer these capabilities and more, extending beyond the reliability, stability and production-readiness for which the platform is known. The latest additions to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 platform help organizations recognize more value from existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions with:

• New intelligent management and monitoring capabilities via updates to Red Hat Insights

• Enhanced container tools

• A smoother user experience for Linux experts and newcomers alike

 

Smarter monitoring for a distributed IT organization

 

As the world works to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, more and more IT organizations are operating remotely or with limited manpower. Now more than ever, IT teams need to be able to monitor, manage and analyze the underlying foundations of enterprise technology stacks, regardless of size, scale, complexity or where they reside across hybrid/multicloud footprints. Red Hat Enterprise Linux can help intelligently detect, diagnose and address potential issues before they impact production, driven by advancements in Red Hat Insights.

 

Red Hat Insights, Red Hat’s proactive operations and security risk management offering, is included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions for versions 6.4 and higher. The latest updates to the service add new use case functionality and features including:

• Improved visibility into IT security, compliance postures and operational efficiencies helping to eliminate manual methods and improve productivity in managing large and complex environments while enhancing security and compliance across these deployments.
• New Policies and Patch services to help organizations define and monitor important internal policies and determine which Red Hat product advisories apply to Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances as well as guidance for remediation.
• Drift service to help IT teams compare systems to baselines, providing a benchmark to guide strategies for reducing complexity and expediting troubleshooting. 

 

Additional monitoring and performance updates in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 include:

• Improved resource management with Control Groups (cgroups) v2, which is designed to help limit memory usage through reserving memory and setting usage floors/limits. This helps prevent specific processes from overconsuming memory and causing system failures or slowdowns.
• Better capabilities for optimizing performance-sensitive workloads through NUMA and sub-NUMA service policies.
• Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) 5.0.2 which adds new collection agents for Microsoft SQL Server 2019 to help collect and analyze a wide array of SQL Server-related metrics, providing a clearer picture for database and operating system tuning.
• Red Hat subscription watch, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) tool that enables customers to more easily view and manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform subscriptions across hybrid cloud infrastructure.

 

Evolved container tools to build for the future

 

While containerized workloads provide a clear path towards digital transformation and a cloud-native future, the tools used to build these applications must balance the latest, up-to-date innovations with a stable and supported lifecycle. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, an updated application stream of Red Hat’s container tools is available, supported for 24 months. Additionally, for organizations looking to build containers inside of containers for additional layers of isolation and security, containerized versions of Skopeo and Buildah are available in Tech Preview.

 

To further extend the security of containerized workloads, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 introduces Udica, a new tool for more easily creating customized, container-centric SELinux security policies. When applied to a specific workload, Udica can reduce the risk that a process can “break out” of a container and cause problems across other containers or to the host itself.

 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 also introduces enhancements to the Red Hat Universal Base Image, including:

• OpenJDK and .NET 3.0 for expanded developer choice in building Red Hat certification-ready cloud-native applications
• Improved access to source code associated with a given image through a single command, making it easier for Red Hat partners to meet source code requirements for open source licensing needs.

 

Further streamlining the user experience

 

With Linux continuing to grow as the backbone for enterprise IT, lowering the barrier for new and existing users is a key focus for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2. To help facilitate improved ease of use and an overall user experience, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 adds:

• Integrated Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription registration as part of the installation process, providing an easier on-boarding experience for new installations.
• The ability to enable Red Hat Insights during installation to simplify the launch of Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux estates of any size.
• Continued refinement and control of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux life cycle with testing for in-place upgrades, Red Hat Insights rules to help with upgrades, and the Convert2 RHEL tool which can help shift workloads from unsupported Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones like CentOS to the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform.