Red Hat has announced the availability of the beta for the first update to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. The beta provides new features, bug fixes and support for new hardware from partners. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, the last major operating platform release, included features applicable to all computing environments - from physical to virtual to the cloud - with improvements in performance, scalability and reliability, and according to Red Hat, the release has already set a new standard in storage performance based on internal testing by Red Hat engineering.
Noteworthy improvements in the beta have been made in the areas of virtualization performance optimizations, in order to minimize virtualization overhead in comparison to bare metal operation; new hardware enablement, supporting the current generation of multicore processors and peripherals as well as improving reliability; and in operational efficiency, for improved system services, resource control and performance. In addition, improvements have been made in development and monitoring tools; and in the high availability option.
More details are available in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.1 beta release notes.