As a heads up RHEL 7.3 is released: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/7.3_Release_Notes/index.html Pay careful attention when the CR repo starts churning out RPMs (if you have CR enabled) as there have been a few rebases in this - notably firewalld, NetworkManager, freeIPA, libreoffice, samba, amongst others If you have an ipv6 environment ping is now ipv6 aware and ping6 is removed (with a symlink to ping for compatibility). On the SSL side of things pycurl now handles TLS 1.1 and 1.2 and openJDK8 can handle ECC. With the NetworkManager rebase more complicated arbitrary layering of interfaces is possible (eg physical -> team -> vlan -> bridge), which I'll be revisiting my old NM article to investigate soon, and Wi-Fi scanning will use a randomised MAC ... this may affect some people. For a known BSSID the connect won't be a randomised MAC though just when scanning. The firewalld zones become a bit more usable with ipsets being usable to define the zone making management of which networks go in which zones a bit nicer - I'll be revisiting my old firewalld article to investigate this too. The deprecation of the old net-tools suite continues with bridge-utils no longer required in many circumstances as iproute2 gets improved bridge capabilties... this brings EL7 inline with the Fedora behaviour: https://fedoramagazine.org/build-network-bridge-fedora/ On the network side of things be aware of a potentially breaking change to systems in how device names are created, this will only affect systems that have exceptionally long device names: https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html-single/7.3_Release_Notes/index.html#bug_fixes_general_updates For fresh installs using automatic partitioning the default /boot size has been bumped to 1G ... for kickstarts and other automated installs you may want to tweak your setups to match. The NSS bug that caused problems with reusing SSL sessions and was breaking owncloud setups has been resolved - I have not tested this yet and will be doing so this weekend. The impending owncloud 9.1.1 EL7 release in EPEL7 will be removing my workaround and require this for full correct functionality. In the tech preview world nftables joins the testing group (I'll have articles up exploring this new firewalling method in the coming weeks) for networking. Whilst with storage overlayfs and btrfs remain in tech preview status - with cephfs joining them... as notable pieces. There's also new pNFS stuff. This is only a small snippet of things that jumped out relevant to me personally. As always make sure you read through the release notes in full. to be ready once CentOS starts producing the RPMs, and keep in mind this early in the lifecycle there are a fair few rebases and new features implemented that should be tested... unlike later on in the lifecycles (eg EL6) where no/minimal rebasing happens and changes at a feature level don't happen.