Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 Beta Available for Testing

The beta of the first minor update to the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.0 is here. RHEL 6.1 Beta comes with a number of bug fixes, security and stability improvements, but also some performance optimizations and a couple of other tweaks, building on top of RHEL 6 and providing a more polished experience overall.

"Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 takes another step forward with the availability of the beta for the first update to the platform. The beta includes new features, bug fixes and support for new hardware from our key partners," Red Hat announced.

"We encourage our customers, partners and the community to install the beta and share your feedback on this latest update to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 with us," it added.

One of the big improvements in the upcoming update is better performance for virtualized environments. With virtualization being one of the biggest trends in the enterprise space, it's no wonder that Red Hat is focusing on this aspect the most.

Specifically, RHEL 6.1 Beta includes network latency improvements since the functionality has been pushed to the kernel routines. Ioeventfd improves disk read/write latency. Metadata caching of qcow2 images further improves I/O overhead.

RHEL 6.1 Beta also adds support for more exotic hardware configurations, encountered in data centers and similar environments. There is also support for the PCI express 3.0 standard. Many more mainstream drivers were also updated.

The High Availability add-on also gets a couple of improvements in RHEL 6.1 Beta. For one, it can now be used to offer failover capabilities for KVM guests operating systems. There is also better documentation for the feature.

You can get a much more detailed overview of all new features and improvements in RHEL 6.1 Beta in the release notes.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 Beta ISO images can be downloaded by all existing RHEL subscribers via the Red Hat Networks service. Remember that this is a beta release and it should not be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.