Unite flexibility and manageability with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3 and 8.9

Each organization has a unique set of requirements, goals and strategies, and your IT infrastructure is instrumental in achieving your organization’s objectives—building the right environment at the right time is critical. While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to constructing IT environments, there are common technologies that nearly all organizations need to be successful.

From small startups seeking cost-effective solutions to large enterprises prioritizing scalability and security, standardizing on a flexible, stable and consistent IT foundation can help you efficiently build and deploy applications and services across hybrid environments. For this standardized operating environment to be effective, however, you must be able to install, configure and manage your operating system according to your needs and goals.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) brings greater flexibility and manageability together into a single, more consistent foundation, so you can build the right environment for your organization and adapt as your needs change. With RHEL 9.3 and 8.9, we’ve added more features and capabilities to help you customize your operating environment while maintaining the consistency needed for more efficient management and deployment across varied infrastructures.

RHEL 9.3 is available today on the Red Hat Customer Portal for all customers with active RHEL subscriptions. RHEL 8.9 will be available soon.

Deploy and migrate rapidly

Operating system deployment and migration are core IT management activities. New options in RHEL streamline these tasks, so your IT teams can focus on more strategic goals.

The included image builder service lets you build and templatize customized, hardened operating system images that conform to your specific IT security requirements and deploy them more easily to multiple environments and infrastructure footprints. The on-premises version of the tool now includes support for AWS hybrid-boot configurations that let you take advantage of features like UEFI Secure Boot. You can also package VMware images and import them into your VMware vSphere Template Library for faster virtual machine provisioning.

If your organization runs other RPM-based Linux distributions and wants to standardize on RHEL to boost manageability, security footprints and reliability, you can take advantage of the Convert2RHEL tool to simplify your migrations.

Convert2RHEL provides a streamlined, simplified way to convert your existing Linux systems— both in on-site datacenters and in cloud environments —directly into RHEL systems. Convert2RHEL minimizes the need for costly redeployment projects and reduces administrative burden by maintaining existing operating system customizations, configurations and preferences during the conversion.

With Convert2RHEL, there’s no need to tear down or redeploy your application stack, so you can minimize disruptions to your operations and get started faster. Learn more about Convert2RHEL in this blog post.

Simpler configuration and management activities

Efficient, consistent, repeatable system configuration is critical for managing large-scale environments. Advanced configuration and management capabilities in RHEL help you drive towards this holistic simplicity by automating system configurations, helping to maintain greater consistency across your entire environment.

RHEL system roles let you automate many common administrative tasks. For example, enhancements to the Podman role help you manage Podman containers in a more streamlined way. You can now automate the configuration of Podman networks, health checks and secrets and use Quadlet container definitions to simplify container definition and deployment across RHEL instances.

New options in the kdump (kernel crash dump) role give you more flexibility in setting basic parameters. The Storage and Microsoft SQL roles include expanded capabilities, and we’ve launched several new system roles for configuring and managing Keylime servers, systemd and PostgreSQL databases.

The RHEL web console’s intuitive browser interface also includes new features. You can better manage images on RHEL for Edge systems, analyze system performance and troubleshoot issues faster, and administer container workloads more easily.

RHEL 9.3 also fully supports Stratis, a local storage management system for Linux that pools physical storage devices and helps to set up and oversee more complex storage configurations. Using the web console, you can more easily manage Stratis storage pools by configuring the no-overprovision mode on a pool, adding a cache block device to encrypted pools, starting a stopped pool, binding an encrypted pool using network-bound disk encryption (NBDE) and changing encryption passphrases.

Optimize system performance

Effective performance management is an essential component for keeping the systems your organization relies on up and running. RHEL contains comprehensive performance monitoring, tracing and analysis tools to help you optimize your systems, regardless of underlying hardware or running workloads.

Included with RHEL, performance co-pilot is a suite of tools, services and libraries for monitoring, visualizing, storing and analyzing system-level performance measurements. The latest version of performance co-pilot adds new metrics to help you monitor the performance of—and quickly detect potential issues with—more aspects of your hardware, including interrupts, non-volatile storage and external memory.

New webhook actions integrate with Event-Driven Ansible so you can use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to monitor system performance and automatically take corrective actions when problems occur.

Finally, improvements in Grafana 9.2.10—also included with RHEL 9.3 and 8.9—make it easier to analyze streaming performance data and share it with your team.

Deliver higher-quality user experiences

For many organizations, selecting tool versions is a balancing act. While developers often require the latest features and updates in core technologies like compilers, runtimes, databases and web servers, IT operations teams need to deploy tested and hardened versions of these applications into production.

Application Streams lets you update tools and technologies in RHEL separately from the core operating system, allowing both developers and IT operations teams to choose the technology versions that fit their needs.

RHEL 9.3 and 8.9 include new Application Streams for Node.js 20, Java-21, Redis 7 and compiler toolkits, so your developers can take advantage of the latest technology features.

Build an adaptable IT environment that supports your organization’s goals

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides the greater consistency, control and flexibility you need to achieve your organization’s goals today and in the future. The latest features in RHEL 9.3 and 8.9 help you deploy, configure and optimize your IT foundation to help your organization innovate and succeed.

Learn more about the latest features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.3.

Additional resources

• RHEL 9.3/8.9 press release
• RHEL 9.3 product download
• RHEL 9.3 release notes