IT is at the center of modern business operations

Today’s IT teams play a more strategic and central role in business success. As a result, IT environments must be managed efficiently to deliver the most value. Systems administrators need streamlined, effective tools that let them optimize IT and foster innovation across their organization.

Red Hat^® Enterprise Linux^® 8 provides an intelligent, stable, and security-focused IT foundation for modern, agile business operations. Consistency across infrastructure allows you to deploy applications, workloads, and services in the same manner, using the same tools, regardless of their location. A seamless, nondisruptive migration process for existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments lets you upgrade more easily. And a predictable, time-based release cadence makes it easier to plan and schedule larger datacenter and system updates, upgrades, and transitions.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 includes many new systems administration and security features — including a web-based management console, a new package control method, and the Red Hat Insights analytics solution — to simplify and streamline IT operations.

Unified, easy-to-use management tools

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 contains unified management and monitoring tools to help you administer your systems more easily and avoid downtime. An improved management console features a webbased, mobile-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) that simplifies operations and eases adoption for new Linux users. You can perform day-to-day administration tasks — like viewing performance statistics, inspecting logs, configuring networks and storage, starting and stopping services, and managing subscriptions — all from a single interface.

The image builder tool lets you set up a standard system blueprint and create customized image files for multiple hypervisors, including OpenStack^®, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and VMware. This makes it easier to deploy workloads across hybrid and multicloud infrastructure.

Every active Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription now includes access to Red Hat Insights. A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, Red Hat Insights delivers predictive operating system analytics that help you rapidly identify and remediate threats to security, performance, availability, and stability. Proactive, automated, targeted issue resolution helps to ensure that your environment is operating optimally to avoid problems and unplanned downtime. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 contains the Red Hat Insights client in the operating system install media to make adoption even easier.

Additionally, new settings simplify and optimize subscription management. The system purpose setting allows you to identify key system features like intended use, type, and support level. This information is then used to assign the optimal subscription entitlement for that system.

Simplified tool administration

Application Streams provides a new, streamlined method for managing userspace tool versions and updates. A simplified repository structure lets you more easily deploy different package versions according to workload and application needs. You can opt into streams for versions you want and change versions on your schedule, independent of system updates and upgrades. New versions are added at a cadence that makes sense for each component, rather than combining them into a monolithic distribution. As a result, you can more easily access the latest stable versions of the programming languages, tools, and databases your organization needs.

Streamlined security management

Several new security tools help you better protect your datacenter and business. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 provides terminal session recording integrated with auditing. This feature records both the input (optional) and output of users’ shell sessions — including text window resizing and timing — and correlates them with the environment and state of the system. Sessions are recorded as JSONformatted audit records via file, system journal, or syslog. Integration with SSSD (System Security Services Daemon) and Red Hat Identity Management allows you to record sessions on a per-user or per-group basis. You can play back sessions via a terminal window or the web console.

New system-wide cryptographic profiles make it easier to manage and automate cryptographic settings, reducing the risk of errors and increasing compliance. Rather than configuring services manually, you can use a single command to change cryptographic settings across your environment.

Simplified container tools

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 provides new tools to simplify and improve container management and security. The Podman and Buildah tools remove the need for daemons when creating and managing containers. Buildah allows you to build and modify containers without any daemon or docker. Podman lets you administer containers without daemon dependencies and is docker command-line interface- (CLI) compatible. Switching from Docker to Podman is very easy and intuitive — two commands are all you need.

Learn more

To support digital business, IT teams need to optimize their infrastructure and foster innovation across their organization. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 delivers the control, confidence, and management tools you need for modern, agile business operations.

Learn more at redhat.com/en/technologies/linux-platforms/enterprise-linux.

Already a customer? Visit access.redhat.com/products/red-hat-enterprise-linux/.