IBM's Red Hat business yesterday announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, the latest version of its flagship enterprise Linux platform. This release brings a range of new capabilities aimed at simplifying managing  of hybrid cloud computing environments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the foundation for Red Hat's operating system efforts. The RHEL 9.0 release first debuted in 2022 and now has had four iterative updates that bring in incremental functionality. RHEL 9.4 continues Red Hat's drive to make automation an integral part of modern Linux platforms. The release further extends RHEL system roles which help to configure and launch common administrative tasks.

“RHEL system roles is a term that describes a collection of Ansible scripts which configure a particular function or workload,” Eric Hendricks, senior technical marketing manager, RHEL told SDxCentral.

How system roles boost Linux automation

The system roles in RHEL 9.4 span multiple aspects of system administration.

Among the system roles-related capabilities in RHEL 9.4 are system roles at the edge through the rpm-ostree package system. These system roles enable users to automate operating system-level tasks at the edge, such as deploying container workloads with Podman containers.

On the security front, a system role known as'fapolicyd  will help with security automation allowing or denying application executions at scale, reducing the potential for human error in possible breach escalations. There is also a snapshot system role for administrators to create and manage point-in-time snapshots of logical volume manager (LVM) storage volumes, speeding up backup and recovery solutions at scale.

In any Linux system the kernel command line is a foundational technology. In RHEL 9.4 there is now a bootloader system role to help configure the kernel command line, improving the consistency and management of Linux systems at scale.

Expanding hardware ecosystem support Arm platform

With the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4, the platform now offers full support for the Arm architecture.

Previously in Technology Preview, support is now provided for Arm 64-based server platform hosts running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 Arm 64 guests with 64k page sizes, further expanding the hardware ecosystem options for organizations.

Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console aims to ease management

As part of the RHEL 9.4 release, the company is also releasing the new Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console virtual assistant.

Hendricks explained that Hybrid Cloud Console virtual assistant brings chat-like functionality to Red Hat Insights. For example, he noted that the virtual assistant provides the ability to ask about what vulnerabilities are currently present in an organization's environment. He added that it's still relatively early days for the virtual assistant and Red Hat plans on announcing  additional functionality as development cycles continue.

Overall, Hendricks noted that RHEL is continuing to move forward, adding features in line with a growing focus on zero trust as well as continuing to build new features to bring more actionable data to tools like Red Hat Insights.

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also exploring the world of AI as a workload, running a LLM on top of RHEL and asking if AI can make the job of a Systems Administrator easier,” he said. “Red Hat Summit is next week in Denver, CO, and we’ll be making announcements about RHEL and the rest of the portfolio and some of our hopes moving forward. ”