Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) released

After a long development phase Red Hat has finally announced the next major release of their enterprise distribution. Everything is new and updated, so it will take time to get familiar with the new distribution.

The kernel level of the GA version is kernel-3.10.0-123, however as this is a new release I strongly recommend everyone to apply the updates from Red Hat to get the bug fixes that didn't make the DVD! As of 7/4 the latest update kernel is kernel-3.10.0-123.4.

Here is my usual summary of links to more information:

• Complete RHEL 7 documentation
• RHEL 7.0 release notes
• RHEL 7.0 System z specific technology previews 
• RHEL 7.0 known issues, read this carefully!
• RHEL 7.0 installation guide
• Please note that the X11 installation is no longer supported by Red Hat on any platform. You have to choose between text mode, VNC or kickstart.
• RHEL 7.0 performance tuning guide
• IBM documentation on developerworks
• RHEL limits
• RHEL lifecycle - full 10 year support
• RHEL7 package list
• IBM tested platforms and example parm files for installation (you need to change all the actual values).
• Red Hat hardware certifications: z114, z196, zBC12, zEC12
  RHEL7 is not going to work on older machines. Be aware that if your SSI contains an older machine (e.g. z10) z/VM is going to prevent it from running on supported machines as well.
• Red Hat presentation at the Boeblingen lab

As this is a brand new release there are some hick ups aka bugs to be expected. If you are hitting one, please open a bug report with Red Hat and/or IBM.


(updated 10/31/2014)