On December 4th, Red Hat announced the release of the next beta for its flagship operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.4 is now available. According to the company, the release includes a broad set of updates to the existing feature set and provides rich new functionality in the areas of identity management, file system, virtualization, and storage as well as productivity tools.
While still primarily a server operating system RHEL 6.4 is designed “for optimized performance, stability and flexibility to cater to today’s diverse workloads running in physical, virtual and cloud environments.” The shipping version of RHEL 6.4 is due out in the first quarter of 2013.
Perhaps RHEL 6.4 most significant improvement is that it will include Microsoft’s Hyper-V Linux drivers.These will improve RHEL’s overall performance on Microsoft Hyper-V and enable Microsoft Azure users to run RHEL 6.4 as persistent virtual machines.