RHEL 6 was officially released in November of 2010, and with Red Hat Enterprise Linux receiving a major update approximately every two years, RHEL 7 is due to be released sometime in 2013.
Tim Burke, vice-president of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, noted that key themes for RHEL 7 will include data center operational efficiency, virtualization and cloud enhancements as well as advancements in the integrated developers’ tools.
“The status is we have now completed product planning, and there will be a RHEL 7 public beta in the first half of 2013,” Burke said.
Users don’t have to wait until 2013, though, to get their first preview of the technology that will land in RHEL 7. Burke confirmed that many of the new RHEL 7 features are in the recently released Fedora 17 community Linux distributions, and there are also some new RHEL 7 features that will debut in Fedora 18, which is due out by the end of the year.
Among the new features set to land in version 7 are full support for several technologies currently considered to be tech previews in the latest RHEL 6 update. Linux Container virtualization will be fully supported in RHEL7, including new SELinux and other security-related improvements to ensure full security