Red Hat offers up to 4 years of Extended Lifecycle Support for RHEL 7

Red Hat offers up to 4 years of Extended Lifecycle Support for RHEL 7

Red Hat offers up to 4 years of Extended Lifecycle Support for RHEL 7.

As the ten-year lifespan of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) standard draws to a close, some businesses are finding they won’t be able to complete planned migrations by June 30, 2024.

To support IT teams in catching up with their migration plans, Red Hat is announcing a 4-year ELS maintenance period for RHEL 7 ELS.

All RHEL major releases follow the standard ten-year life cycle.

For the first five years, Red Hat provides comprehensive support, including bug fixes, security patches, software enhancements, hardware support, and backports.

For the next five years, maintenance support is provided, with security patches and bug fixes released as needed.

Since then, RHEL has entered the Extended Life Phase (ELP).

During this time, users will continue to have access to previously published content in the Red Hat Customer Portal and the Red Hat Knowledge Base.

In addition, Red Hat may provide limited ongoing technical support and advice on migrating to currently supported versions of RHEL.

For enterprises that need to continue using major versions after the end of the standard life cycle, the company offers an Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS, Extended Life Cycle Support) add-on product.

This add-on extends support for a major version (of a Red Hat product) for up to 2 years beyond the end of the standard release lifecycle.

As an optional add-on subscription, ELS can gain access to last-minor release troubleshooting, optional urgent-prioritized bugfixes, and specific Red Hat-defined security fixes.

Red Hat rates the severity of security issues using a 4-level rating system (Low, Moderate, Important, and Critical).

With the ELS, fixes for critical and critical public vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) as defined by Red Hat, the highest of the two severity levels, will be available.

Significant CVEs may compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of resources, while severe CVEs may be exploited by remote, unauthenticated attackers and cause systems to be compromised without user interaction.

Starting from July 1, 2024, the ELS of RHEL 7 will provide technical support services for users in need for a period of 4 years.

However, before using ELS, users must upgrade RHEL7 to RHEL 7.9 to enjoy this service.

Compared to previous major releases, ELS for RHEL 7 (RHEL 7.9) expands the scope of security fixes by including updates that address important CVEs.

It also includes maintenance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP solutions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux High Availability and Resilient Storage components.

To help with long-term IT infrastructure strategy, Red Hat plans to offer a 3-year ELS for RHEL 8 and 9.