Adds some extra features that help system administrators

May 23, 2017 22:11 GMT  ·  By

Red Hat announced today the availability of the Beta release of the upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 operating system, the fourth major update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 series of enterprise-ready OSes.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Beta is designed to give customers an early look at the features coming to the final release of the OS, which is expected in the coming months, allowing them to thoroughly test the new functionality and report any issues or concerns about them to make the final build stable and reliable.

"The Beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 includes a number of new and updated features to help organizations bolster security and compliance, better streamline management and automation, and realize an improved systems administration experience," reads today's announcement.

Highlights of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4

Prominent features of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 release include network-bound disk encryption support to diminish the difficulty of managing disk encryption at scale, enablement of various new TLS (Transport Layer Security) protocol features in OpenSSL, including ALPN (Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation), and updated audit capabilities.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 will also ship with Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles, which are designed to make system configuration easier and simplify the management and maintenance of all of your Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 deployments. Additionally, system administrators will benefit from new features to help them spend less time triaging issues and events.

These include a bunch of extra enhancements to RAID Takeover, so you can easily change RAID configurations and characteristics on the fly, the latest NetworkManager 1.8 network connection manager, and support for new PCP (Performance Co-Pilot) client tools. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.4 Beta is available for download right now from Red Hat's Customer Portal for customers with active subscriptions.