With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 beta now available, users will get to experience several exciting features that go a long way to improve the overall experience of the enterprise-grade operating system.

One of the more notable features in the beta is the web console. This tool is based on the upstream Cockpit project and serves as a web-based interface for monitoring and managing your systems. RHEL 8.5 brings along with it a few new features to this utility, such as enhanced web console performance metrics (which can help identify potential causes of high CPU, memory, disk, and network usage spikes). Those metrics can now also be exported to a Grafana server. Another exciting new feature to the web console is kernel live patching has been added to provide a simplified interface for applying live kernel updates. 

Outside of the web console, you'll find new and/or enhanced system roles for popular RHEL workloads, such as RHEL system role for MS SQL, RHEL system role for VPN, RHEL system role for Postfix, RHEL system role for timesync, and RHEL system role for Storage.

Other new additions include support for OpenJDK 17, as well as updates for other developer languages. Red Hat has also put in significant time to improve features for running Linux containers. 

Along with this, Red Hat has introduced a new Red Hat Enterprise Linux Beta experience. As of September 15, 2021, Red Hat changed the RHEL beta subscription process so users are no longer required to sign up to gain access to the RHEL beta. For more information on this, check out the official announcement.