Red Hat has announced the beta of RHEL 7.5, which supports alternative architectures, with variants available for IBM Power, IBM System z, and Arm deployments as well as x86.

Security is certainly the key highlight of this release. Red Hat said in a press release that RHEL 7.5 beta comes with security improvements and usability enhancements for cloud and remotely hosted systems that can more securely unlock Network Bound Disk Encrypted devices at boot time, designed to eliminate the need for manual intervention in an often inconveniently timed boot process.

This release also integrates Red Hat Ansible Automation with OpenSCAP, which enhances the ease of automating the remediation of compliance issues and enables administrators to scale policies across their environment more efficiently.

RHEL 7.5 beta also improves compliance for accurate timestamping and synchronization needs with the addition of failover with bonding interfaces for Precision Time Protocol (PTP) and Network Time Protocol (NTP).

RHEL 7.5 Beta enhances usability for Linux administrators, Windows administrators new to the platform, and developers seeking self-service capabilities alike with an easier to use cockpit administrator console. The console is designed to simplify the interface for managing storage, networking, containers, services, and more for individual systems.

Sys admins will love the automated creation of a "known-good" bootable snapshot to help speed recovery and rollback after patching, helping IT teams feel more confident that their systems are in working order.

Users can download the beta for testing.