Red Hat has announced the beta availability of its next-generation Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) operating system platform.

The new beta marks the first major public milestone release of RHEL 7, which is the successor to the RHEL 6 platform that first debuted in 2010 and was most recently updated with the 6.5 release in November.

RHEL 7 is based on the Fedora 19 community Linux release and the Linux 3.10 kernel, both of which first debuted in July. The company said it has been hardening the Fedora 19 base over the last several months to ensure enterprise-grade stability.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 is designed to provide the underpinning for future application architectures while providing the flexibility, scalability, and performance needed to deploy across bare metal, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure.

Over the last decade Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become the world’s leading Linux enterprise Linux platform and has been “a leading force” in enterprise data centers. 

One of the major changes in RHEL 7 is the move from Ext4 to XFS as the default file system. Ext4 and its predecessor Ext3 have long been the default file systems in Red Hat’s Linux distributions.

XFS can support systems of up to 500TB in size; in contrast, Ext4 scales to a maximum stand-alone file system of 50TB.

Red Hat will continue to support Ext4 in its distribution and will also include the Btrfs file system as a tech preview. It had indicated in June 2012 it intended to more fully integrate Btrfs into RHEL 7.

Rival Linux distributions from SUSE and Oracle already fully support Btrfs.