Red Hat Announces Availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Beta

Today marks an exciting milestone for Red Hat as we share news of the beta availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Since its introduction more than a decade ago, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become the world's leading enterprise Linux platform, and it has helped set industry standards for performance, capacity, capability and security. Today, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a leading force in enterprise datacenters; it spans nearly every industry and has advanced to deliver the original cloud operating system, powering many of the world's largest clouds.

With today's announcement, we are inviting Red Hat customers, partners, and members of the public to provide feedback on what we believe is our most ambitious release to date. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to provide the underpinning for future application architectures while and providing the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed to deploy across bare metal, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure.
Simply put, we believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 represents the future of IT. As hypervisors and cloud deployments become increasingly common and face integration with physical servers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 continues Red Hat's track record of cultivating a foundation upon which to build next-generation IT infrastructure, as no other Linux operating system combines the flexibility and stability needed to handle critical workloads across all environments with as extensive an ecosystem of solutions and support.
Based on Fedora 19 and the upstream Linux 3.10 kernel, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will provide users with powerful new capabilities that streamline and automate installation and deployment, simplify management, and enhance ease-of-use, all while delivering the stability that enterprises have come to expect from Red Hat. This further solidifies Red Hat Enterprise Linux's place as the world's leading Linux platform and a standard for the enterprise of the future. Whether rolling out new applications, virtualizing environments or scaling the business with cloud, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 delivers the keystone to IT success.
The beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 adds value to new and existing IT projects across industries by adding key capabilities to improve critical but often cumbersome IT tasks like virtualization and storage while offering a clear pathway to the open hybrid cloud. Several key new and enhanced features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 beta include:

Physical and Hosted In-place Upgrades
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 will offer an in-place upgrade feature for common server deployment types, allowing data centers to migrate existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.5 systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. Additionally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 enables virtual machine migration from a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 host to a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 host without virtual machine modification or downtime.