Speed innovation with new features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2 and 8.8

It’s no secret that IT organizations are asked to do more than ever before. While earlier digital transformation efforts were often limited in scope to a single business unit or platform, today’s initiatives are frequently far more expansive. IT teams are now expected to execute end-to-end transformation projects, connecting technology, people and processes across their organizations. These projects encompass a broad spectrum of infrastructure, tools, operations and requirements, significantly increasing complexity and risk.

That’s where Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) comes in. Trusted by IT organizations for more than 20 years, RHEL provides a more flexible, stable and consistent platform for building and deploying applications and services across hybrid environments with less effort. And, with RHEL 9.2 and 8.8, we’ve added more features and capabilities to help you innovate more quickly, streamline your infrastructure, better protect your workloads and data, and operate with confidence. RHEL 9.2 is available today on the Red Hat Customer Portal for all customers with active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions. RHEL 8.8 will be available soon. 

Streamline system management

Efficient systems management is critical for large and complex hybrid cloud environments. RHEL includes a variety of tools to help you overcome infrastructure complexity, and optimize the ongoing administration of your systems so you can devote more time to high-value, strategic projects. Two key tools—system roles and Podman—feature new content and capabilities to help streamline operations.

New RHEL system roles let you automate even more management tasks across minor releases to boost speed and accuracy. For example, the Podman role streamlines the deployment of production-ready container workloads on RHEL hosts. The ad_integration role lets you directly integrate your RHEL systems with Microsoft Active Directory for centralized identity and access control. The rhc (remote host configuration) role automatically registers your RHEL systems with our valuable hosted services like Red Hat Insights, so you can access expertise and recommendations from the start. And you can simplify and speed up Microsoft SQL Server installation, configurations and deployment with the Microsoft SQL role.

Enhancements to Podman streamline container management across environments. You can now define automated response actions to be performed when containers fail a health check to support higher availability for critical systems and more autonomous operations in remote locations. You can also track container creation events to aid auditing. 

Support developers with the latest tools and improvements

To be most effective, your developers need access to the latest features, fixes and improvements for the tools they rely on. Application Streams give you the flexibility to update a growing selection of technologies in RHEL separately from the core operating system, allowing your staff to experiment with the latest tools, languages and databases while maintaining earlier versions of production applications. You can also now access new and updated Application Streams for some of the most popular languages, tools and databases like Python 3.11, which delivers up to 60% faster performance than the previous version. [Source: “What’s New In Python 3.11.” Python Software Foundation, accessed 4 May 2023.]

Maximize performance on ARM systems

As computer architectures continue to evolve, we work closely with hardware partners, as well as the upstream community, to optimize RHEL for a range of platforms so you can deploy workloads on a consistent foundation across varied environments. Continuing on this work, RHEL 9.2 for ARM now includes support for 64K page sizes to maximize the performance of large data set workloads—including traditional high-performance computing, databases and machine learning—on datacenter-class ARM servers.

Deploy more consistently across environments

Most IT organizations operate multiple infrastructures and environments. The included image builder tool lets you create, manage and deploy RHEL operating system images across hybrid cloud environments more quickly and easily. You can create customized images, save them as templates, and push them to multiple cloud provider inventories to simplify provisioning. New security and system configuration options give you more flexibility and control over your images, so you can build an environment that best supports your business needs.

Gain insight into your systems

Understanding the status of your IT systems is the first step to optimizing them for security, performance and availability. Included with RHEL, Red Hat Insights uses predictive analytics and deep domain expertise to identify operational and security risks and generate prioritized insights and recommendations for you to take action. To help you better optimize your systems, Insights now includes edge- and container-specific recommendations, improved resource optimization data and reports, and integration with ServiceNow, Slack and Splunk.

Upgrade your operating system on your schedule

While we recommend that organizations upgrade to each RHEL minor release as it occurs, we realize that some may wish or need to stay on a particular minor release for an extended period. For many years, the Extended Update Support (EUS) Add-On for RHEL has helped these customers by providing two years of updates and support for minor releases. Now, with the new Enhanced EUS Add-On, you can remain on select RHEL 9 minor releases for up to four years, giving you more flexibility when planning operating system transitions for critical environments.

Accelerate innovation with RHEL 9.2 and 8.8

RHEL provides a trusted foundation with the flexibility, stability and reliability to support workloads and applications across hybrid cloud environments. The latest features in RHEL 9.2 and 8.8 support your modernization and transformation efforts while giving you a clear path for future innovation.

Learn more about the latest features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.2.

Additional resources

• RHEL 9.2/8.8 press release
• RHEL 9.2 product download
• RHEL 9.2 documentation
• RHEL 9.2 release notes