Over three years in the making, the intention behind Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (RHEL 6) is to equip the flagship Red Hat platform to handle the changing computing demands of its mostly large enterprise customers. As such RHEL 6 boasts major enhancements in terms of scalability, reliability and virtualisation, although they’re not all immediately obvious and one or two may not be to everyone’s liking.

One of the most welcome changes is enhanced support for the latest multi-core processors, Red Hat claiming the ability to handle up to 4,096 cores/threads per system image in RHEL 6 – up from 64 in the previous release. Likewise, the addressable memory limit gets a boost, from 1TB to 64TB should you find a server able to support it.