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Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.6 (RHEL) delivers a flexible foundation equipped with intelligent features, expert support and advanced tools. It streamlines application management from development through deployment, regardless of your infrastructure size. With enhanced security features, compliance certifications and smart threat detection, you can confidently modernize your systems. Combined with a strong ecosystem, RHEL 9.6 accelerates deployment, simplifies configuration and enables a secure future.

RHEL Lightspeed

RHEL Lightspeed combines decades of RHEL expertise with AI to simplify and proactively guide Linux professionals.

  • Command line assistant: Powered by RHEL Lightspeed, this feature allows you to ask questions in plain English directly within the terminal, and provides instant answers, recommendations, and expert guidance. It simplifies complex tasks for new administrators and boosts efficiency for experienced ones, extending AI-powered help to the command line in RHEL 9.6.
  • Red Hat Insights image builder package recommendations: Leveraging RHEL Lightspeed, this feature offers intelligent package suggestions during image building. This helps in making informed decisions early on, reducing the risk of missing critical components and offering more complete, functional images.

Red Hat Insights Planning for RHEL

Red Hat Insights planning offers access to future roadmaps and package lifecycle data, enabling confident decision-making. By providing visibility into upcoming changes, supported features and deprecations, it helps you build new images with certainty and align systems with your long-term strategy.

New developer features and enhancements

RHEL 9.6 introduces the following enhancements for developers:

  • PHP 8.3: Includes new core language features, Argon2 password algorithm support, updated error handling in the date extension, and the php-pecl-redis6 package for Redis and Valkey databases.
  • NGINX 1.26: Features bug fixes, HTTP/2 support on a per-server basis, stream module enhancements for virtual servers and connection passing, and improved startup performance.
  • Git 2.47: Supports the reftable backend for efficient reference management, introduces pseudo-merge bitmaps for optimized fetch operations and adds incremental multi-pack indexes for efficient updates.
  • Maven 3.9: Includes general fixes, improvements, and backports from Maven 4, and removes Maven 2 backward compatibility.
  • MySQL 8.4: Enhancements to password management, including expiration, length and strength policies. It also includes new authentication improvements and version-compatible backups.
  • Microsoft Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL): Allows running a RHEL development environment on Windows without a traditional virtual machine.

Image mode for RHEL

Image mode provides a consistent approach to building, deploying and managing the operating system (OS) using container technologies. This enables you to manage the OS with the same tools and workflows as applications, fostering a unified experience across teams. Both package mode and image mode are available in RHEL 9.6.

Compliance hardening for image mode for RHEL

Security hardening profiles, including STIG, PCI, and CIS, can now be applied consistently across both package and image modes, simplifying compliance regardless of the image building method.

Automation and management

Red Hat Enterprise Linux continues to enhance automation and management to simplify tasks, standardize deployments and streamline administration. Here are some of the latest ways RHEL can help you with your most vital admin tasks:

Image builder

The RHEL image builder now aligns its user interface with Insights image builder, offering new customization options and integrations. It supports sharing blueprints and creating highly customized images for public cloud, virtual, bare metal and Microsoft’s WSL2.

Web console

The web console introduces "package-less sessions" for remote system management without installing Cockpit packages. It also features a text editor for file editing, Stratis filesystem size limits configuration, and unified management of RHEL and RHEL High Availability Clusters.

System Roles

  • AIDE: Automates the installation and configuration of the Advanced Intrusion Detection Environment, including database initialization and integrity checks.
  • Podman: Enhances Podman configuration with Quadlet support for pod management.
  • systemd: Adds support for systemd user units for automated management and configuration.

RHEL Workloads

  • Simplified HA cluster mount structure for SAP app servers: Simplifies the mount structure in HA clusters for managing SAP app server instances, reducing complexity during failover.
  • Combined HA resource agents for SAP HANA clusters: Introduces a combined resource agent for SAP HANA scale-up and scale-out deployments, simplifying management for RHEL HA solutions.

Encrypted DNS

Adhering to US Government OMB mandates, RHEL 9.6 introduces encrypted DNS to bring confidentiality, integrity and authenticity of information, enhancing security by keeping internal data private.

Domain join with Insights

For users of cloud-based identity management, the domain join feature simplifies joining new images to the domain. Accessible through Insights and the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, this feature performs automatic discovery and reduces manual effort.

Resources for more information

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.6 is an iteration that adds to the strength of the RHEL 9 series, providing a reliable and flexible foundation for your infrastructure and development. You can read more about the RHEL 9.6 release here:

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A version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that orchestrates hardware resources and runs on physical systems, in the cloud, or as a hypervisor guest.

About the author

Gil Cattelain is Principal Product Marketing Manager for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Cattelain has more than 20 years’ experience as a leader in high-tech software product marketing with a proven track record of managing major product releases and go-to-market strategies. Prior to Red Hat, Cattelain held product marketing leadership roles at Micro Focus, Novell, and Genesys, focusing on the endpoint management and DevOps/agile solutions, including digital marketing for the contact center market.

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