In addition, this release offers a ton of changes to benefit enterprise-level companies running Linux systems.

Another important change is teaming, a replacement for the current bonding driver that is used in the creation of virtual interfaces. You will now be able to make a virtual interface that merges together multiple ethernet devices for speed and reliability applications. Teaming is a large improvement over the current round-robin style mode on virtual interfaces, which had each interface sending a packet at a time, one after the other.

Version 3.3. also introduces the new capability to restripe Btrfs, designed for large enterprise storage systems. Striping means creating a logical volume atop multiple drives. Your system will see one disk, and your data will span from one to the next to maximize the speed in which it's accessed. You can have many drives connected in this fashion, and when they fill up, re-striping the drives is a chore for systems as the data has to be moved in the proper order.

But now, if you run out of space in a striped volume, you can add a disk and re-stripe the logical volume over all of the disks. This will be a godsend to IT departments that currently only run time-consuming drive replacements at night. The new Btrfs can pause and resume a balance operation, give updates as to status of the distribution, and even restripe between RAID levels.

The addition of Open vSwitch to the mainline Linux kernel is another important addition. Open vSwitch will replace the Linux bridge in the case of more complex switching needs, such as for virtualized server environments. It supports all of the management interface standards, and it's compatible with modern switching chipsets. Being able to change to a in Btrfs is an added bonus, and the newly included balancing and debugging tools will keep that operation easy to manage and efficient.