Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8, the latest version of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 platform.<\/p>\n
\u201cRed Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 continues to demonstrate Red Hat\u2019s commitment to our customers\u2019 many mission-critical deployments by delivering a proven foundation for the applications and systems that power the modern enterprise. With enhancements to security features and management, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 remains a solid, proven base for modern enterprise IT operations,\u201d says Jim Totton, Vice President and General Manager, Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat.<\/em><\/p>\n Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 includes a number of new and updated features to help organisations bolster platform security and enhance systems management\/monitoring capabilities, including:<\/p>\n Enhanced security, authentication and interoperability<\/strong><\/p>\n To enhance security for virtual private networks (VPNs), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 includes\u00a0libreswan<\/strong>, an implementation of the widely supported and standardised VPN protocols, which replaces openswan as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 VPN endpoint solution, giving Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 customers access to recent advances in VPN security.<\/p>\n Customers running the latest version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 can see increased client-side performance and simpler management through the addition of new capabilities to the Identity Management client code (SSSD).\u00a0Cached authentication lookup<\/strong>\u00a0on the client reduces the unnecessary exchange of user credentials with Active Directory servers. Support for\u00a0adcli<\/strong>\u00a0simplifies the management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 systems interoperating with an Active Directory domain. In addition,\u00a0SSSD now supports user authentication via smart cards<\/strong>, for both system login and related functions such as\u00a0sudo<\/em>.<\/p>\n Enhanced management and monitoring<\/strong><\/p>\n The inclusion of\u00a0Relax-and-Recover<\/strong>, a system archiving tool, provides a more streamlined system administration experience, enabling systems administrators to create local backups in an ISO format that can be centrally archived and replicated remotely for simplified disaster recovery operations. An\u00a0enhanced yum<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong>tool<\/strong>\u00a0simplifies the addition of packages, adding intelligence to the process of locating required packages to add\/enable new platform features.<\/p>\n Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 provides increased visibility into storage usage and performance through dmstats<\/strong>, a programme that displays and manages I\/O statistics for user-defined regions of devices using the device-mapper driver.<\/p>\n Additional enhancements and updates<\/strong><\/p>\n For customers with ever-increasing volumes of data, the scalable file system add-on for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 now supports xfs filesystem sizes up to 300TB.<\/p>\n Additionally, the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 includes the launch of an updated Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 base image which enables customers to migrate their traditional workloads into container-based applications \u2013 suitable for deployment on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Atomic Host.<\/p>\n