What new features are available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.9 and 9.3 Beta?

Red Hat is pleased to announce the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8.9 and 9.3 Beta, designed to provide organizations with the flexibility and reliability to quickly and more securely deploy applications and workloads across hybrid cloud environments. These new features and enhancements enable organizations to maximize efficiency and agility when delivering services, applications and workloads.

Automation and Management. RHEL 8.9/9.3 Beta continues to make automation and management easier for customers with its system roles, which automate common administrative tasks and enable standardization of deployments at scale. New features such as Quadlet support in the Podman system role (for an enhanced container configuration experience), support for configuring additional kdump settings, a new role for Keylime server configuration (to provide security against tampering a host), a new role for systemd automation, enhancements to storage management, a new role for PostgreSQL installation and configuration, and enhancements to the  SQL Server role help customers save time and simplify day-to-day administration.

RHEL web console has new features to make management simpler, such as updating and rolling back images on RHEL for Edge (rpm-ostree) systems, viewing top services consuming disk I/O resources, configuring Podman container health check actions, configuring a vsock device in virtual machines, configuring no-overprovision mode for Stratis storage, and changing encryption passphrases on encrypted Stratis pools (Stratis support is only for 9.3). It also provides users with a color-coded view of their systems' performance by showing a different shade of color when resource usage is high.

Security and compliance are also improved with RHEL 9.3 Beta, which includes live kernel patching, security profiles, security standards certification and trusted software supply chain capabilities to help meet today’s IT security and compliance expectations. Furthermore, Smart Card Automation Roles for deploying with smart card authentication, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform tooling for more consistent and repeatable deployment and allowing accounts stored in external IdPs to access Linux systems* (*Tech Preview until 9.4 GA).

Performance is also now easier to manage with your RHEL subscription, which includes comprehensive monitoring, tracing and analysis tools to help you optimize systems. This includes Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) 6.0.5 and Grafana 9.2.10, which both contain new features. Installations are also simpler with RHEL 8.9/9.3 Beta, as it comes with the RHEL image builder that helps you create optimized and standardized operating system images that can be quickly deployed on any runtime environment across the hybrid cloud.

Developers also benefit from RHEL 8.9/9.3 Beta, which introduces new Application Streams offering greater flexibility and the ability to customize the platform without impacting stability. For containers, RHEL 8.9/9.3 Beta includes new features such as podmansh, Quadlet support in the Podman system role and Podman Health Checks in the web console, as well as enhancements to the Red Hat Universal Base Image.

Finally, RHEL 8.9/9.3 Beta provides organizations running Microsoft SQL Server on RHEL with improved performance through the ability to specify custom data and log directories. In addition, a new RHEL system role for PostgreSQL has been introduced, giving users the ability to automate the installation and configuration of PostgreSQL.

RHEL 8.9/9.3 Beta provides organizations with the flexibility, stability and reliability needed to support their hybrid cloud innovation. With these new features, organizations can better streamline operations, centralize development and management, ensure consistent performance across the data center to the edge, optimize and reduce infrastructure complexity and better protect their systems, wherever they are running across the hybrid cloud.

Additional resources

• RHEL 8.9 Beta Product Documentation
• RHEL 9.3 Beta Product Documentation
• RHEL 8.9 Beta Release Notes
• RHEL 9.3 Beta Release Notes
• Access RHEL 8.9/9.3 Beta from the RHEL product page