Key new features and enhancement details include:
Identity Management
Identity Management
- System Security Services Daemon (SSSD) enhancements improve the interoperability experience with [Microsoft Active Directory] by providing centralized identity access control for Linux/Unix clients in a heterogeneous environment.
File system
- pNFS (Parallel NFS) client (file layout only) remains in technology preview, however now delivers performance improvements with the addition of Direct I/O for faster data access. This drives particular performance benefits for I/O intensive use cases including database workloads.
Virtualization
- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 now includes the Microsoft Hyper-V Linux drivers, which were recently accepted by the upstream Linux community, improving the overall performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 as a guest on Microsoft Hyper-V.
- Installation support for VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V para-virtualization drivers. This new feature enhances the user deployment experience of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a guest in either of these virtualization environments.
- In this release, KVM virtualization virtio-scsi support, a new industry storage architecture, provides industry leading storage stack scalability.
Management
- The use of swap functionality over NFS enables more efficient read/write tradeoffs between local system memory and remote disks. This capability increases performance in very large, disk-less server farms seen in ISP and Web hosting environments.
- Enhancement in c-groups delivers the ability to migrate multi-threaded applications without errors.
- Optimized perf tool for the latest Intel processors
Storage
- New system log features identify mapping from block device name to physical device identifier – allowing an administrator to easily locate specific devices as needed.
Productivity Tools
- Microsoft interoperability improvements with Microsoft Exchange and calendar support in Evolution. Productivity functions, such as calendar support with alarm notification and meeting scheduling is improved.
- Customers such as animation studios and graphic design houses now have support for the newer Wacom tablets.
