According to the company, this 7.2 release focused primarily on security, networking and system administration improvements. "With the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 in June 2014, Red Hat redefined the enterprise open source operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 continues this effort, delivering new capabilities for containerized application deployments and significant networking enhancements while retaining our focus on delivering a stable, reliable and more secure platform for the most critical of business applications," said Jim Totton, Vice President and General Manager, Platforms Business Unit, Red Hat.

On the security front, 7.2 offers a new OpenSCAP Anaconda plug-in that allows for the use of SCAP-based security and configuration during the install process. This creates a secure starting point for system deployments. In addition, continuing security concerns with DNS are addressed in this release. The Red Hat Identity Management System (IdM) now supports DNSSEC for DNS zones.

For networking improvements, Red Hat claimed that throughput has been doubled in many types of network function virtualization (NFV) and software defined networking (SDN) environments. This is in addition to more network kernel stack tuning that improves packet processing time. Also, there is a new TCP (DCTCP) feature that helps solve TCP congestion problems in data centers. This DCTCP works across both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Windows-based hosts.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 also offers new and improved tools to help with the increasingly complex system administration of large-scale datacenters. One such tool is Relax-and-Recover, which is a system archiving tool that creates local backups in ISO format for central or remote storage. The ISO images offer a simplified disaster recovery plan for many cases.

In addition, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 has full compatibility with Red Hat Insights, an add-on analytics platform from Red Hat. Red Hat Insights is available for up to 10 Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 systems at no cost. This analytics package detects technical issues before they become problems via continuous monitoring and automated analysis.

The company also announced the beta of Red Hat Container Development Kit 2, which is a collection of tools and images designed to assist in the creation of containerized applications for use on Red Hat Hosts.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.2 is generally available starting today.