The next major release from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Version 7 will reportedly be out in the second half of 2013. The company made this announcement at its tenth anniversary celebration of its enterprise OS yesterday.
As per company’s plan, it aims to release a major new version of its OS every three years along with updates about every six months, said Jim Totten, vice president and general manager at Red Hat's Platform business unit. Over a webcast, he even said that, “While we are not at a place where we are making announcements ... our general target is the second half of 2013 to see RHEL 7 enter the marketplace.”
While Red Hat is not revealing much about the date of the release, Totten said the OS will have improvements across its more than 2,000 packages and that key focus areas are supporting new hardware, file systems, security and performance.
However, there is an update that's due before then, which is version 6.3. According to a Computer World report, it will include a new tool called Virt-P2V, which allows IT staff to convert physical Windows or Red Hat Enterprise Linux implementations directly into virtual machines, and then be deployed as KVM guests inside Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
