Final Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 Version Released

The last RHEL release, RHEL 7.7, is now available for current Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers via the Red Hat Customer Portal. ZDNet reports on what's new: RHEL 7.7's most important updates are support for the latest generation of enterprise hardware and remediation for the recently disclosed ZombieLoad vulnerabilities. The latest RHEL 7 also includes network stack performance enhancements. With this release, you can offload virtual switching operations to network interface card (NIC) hardware. What that means for you is, if you're using virtual switching and network function virtualization (NFV), you'll see better network performance on cloud and container platforms such as Red Hat OpenStack Platform and Red Hat OpenShift.

RHEL 7.7 users can also use Red Hat's new predictive problem shooter: Red Hat Insights. This uses a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based predictive analytics approach to spot, assess, and mitigate potential problems to their systems before they can cause trouble. For developers, RHEL 7.7 comes with Python 3.6 interpreter, and the pip and setup tools utilities. Previously, Python 3 versions were available only as a part of Red Hat Software Collections. Moving on to the cloud, RHEL 7.7 Red Hat Image Builder is now supported. This feature, which is also in RHEL 8, enables you to easily create custom RHEL system images for cloud and virtualization platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), VMware vSphere, and OpenStack. To help cloud-native developers, RHEL 7.7 includes full support for Red Hat's distributed-container toolkit -- buildah, podman, and skopeo -- on RHEL workstations. After building on the desktop, programmers can use Red Hat Universal Base Image to build, run, and manage containerized applications across the hybrid cloud.

Centos 8 will need an easy update from 7

[Joe_Dragon]

Centos 8 will need an easy update from 7

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Anonymous Coward]

Why will CentOS 8 need an easy update from 7?

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[Anonymous Coward]

CentOS...when Debian 'stable' is too bleeding edge.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Not gonna happen easily, the nightmare that is "modularity" and the multi-channel funked-up-ness that RHEL 8 added is gonig to complicate the hell out of the upgrade process, as the switch from yum to dnf and the "python means python2, even though we refuse to explicitly state it" and the default python3

I could do the switchover, in fact I've done RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 upgrades as a proof of concept. But it involved mixing all the channels into one big repo. and hand-tuning my way around the "modulariy" nightmar

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[Joe_Dragon]

in Ubuntu
sudo do-release-upgrade

centos needs to make it easier then reinstall.

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[Hylandr]

*waste* of mod points.

Do you

[ArchieBunker]

still need to pay for a license? How are they still in business when other distros basically give the same thing away? Yes I know IBM just bought them.

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[F.Ultra]

Because big enterprises likes to purchase support contracts.

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[Rockets84]

When I used to work at a IBM partner, before virtualisation took off, we used RHEL on bare metal x86 servers for a few reasons. First and foremost IBM had certified it on their hardware so we'd get support from IBM & IBM released drivers or programs to control the hardware from within the OS eg RAID controllers. RHEL worked straight out of the box with IBM SAN's with the correct multi pathing installed. And lastly if you had to run any 3rd party commercial software the vendor always supported RHEL, whic

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[F.Ultra]

yes that is one major other reason. Since RH is used a lot in the enterprise and since they also have a very long stable ABI most enterprise software are certified for RH making RH almost mandatory if you want to run enterprise software. Ubuntu have slightly managed to make an inroad here with their LTS releases.

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[DarkOx]

But more than that RH actually backports a lot of fixes for stuff that don't get released to the general public. If you *want* to still be running Linux 2.6.32 but have patches for the various local priv-escs and network issues RH has got your covered.

Sure the source code for the patches is still GPL and yes I think you can get it but..no other distro is packaging backports for stuff that old.

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[F.Ultra]

I think that you have to have a RHEL account in order to get hold of those patches (this was one way that RHAT tried to not have Oracle parasite on their work), now of course every single such account holder could post those patches in public since they are GPL:ed but so far no one or few have.

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[bcwright]

If you don't want to pay for a license, you can wait until the RHEL distro is remastered into the corresponding Centos [centos.org] distribution. It tends to be rather trailing-edge (like RHEL itself), but if you're interested in running stable things like servers that's actually a good thing.

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[Antique Geekmeister]

The CentOS 8 status page is at https://wiki.centos.org/About/... [centos.org], at the bottom. It does look like they're spending quite a lot of time on artwork and rebranding, neither of which are why people use CentOS.

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[WallyL]

The artwork and rebranding are also trivial to do compared to the hard work of actually rebuilding everything, and preparing the infrastructure for, say, how yum repos were redesigned.

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[caseih]

No you don't need to pay for a license. But you do need to pay for a subscription to access updates. Red Hat has built a reputation for keeping things stable and secure, and making it easy to maintain the systems from centralized dashboard of sorts, and enterprises pay good money for that. It's a very easy value proposition.

All of the source code that goes into Red Hat RPMS is available for download the moment it's released. This is where compatible distros such as CentOS and the now-defunct Scientific

*Last* release?

[l2718]

Is Red Hat discontinuing RHEL? Is this is last release our merely the latest one?

Re:*Last* release?

[lessthan0]

Last release of the 7.X series. All future releases will be in the 8.X series.

7.7 support ends in 2021

[emil]

I see the following end of support [redhat.com] dates on Red Hat's site:

• 7.1 (ended March 31, 2017)
• 7.2 (ended November 30, 2017)
• 7.3 (ended November 30, 2018)
• 7.4 (ends August 31, 2019)
• 7.5 (ends April 30, 2020)
• 7.6 (ends October 31, 2020)
• 7.7 (ends August 30, 2021; Final RHEL 7 EUS Release)

NOT the last 7.x version

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure why the article title says it is the last RHEL 7 release. That isn't the case. There will be others... like 7.8, 7.9, etc. It is just that, given its age, it has entered the last phase of its lifecycle. Red Hat has always had such lifecycle phases with previous releases. It just means they no longer focus on enhancements and adding drivers and backporting features... but strictly move into maintenance with bug and security fixes only.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

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[Junta]

Well, there is a potential couple of reasons...

One is that my sense from my dealings with RedHat is that they really want to prioritize weaning customers off of old major releases. Supporting multiple major releases is a significant burden. I think they are wondering if they are fueling a self-fulfilling prophecy by doing these releases of companies wanting these old releases. I would not be surprised if they want to scale back efforts to increase the sense of need to jump to major version. I would say

First line completely wrong

[lotaris]

There will be future RHEL 7 security and stability updates at least through the end of the 10 year support cycle in 2024. That gives time to move workloads to RHEL 8.

Someone talked about upgrading hosts directly. That is possible and supported for RHEL7 to RHEL 8 with some limitations and there are built in tools to help by pre scanning your RHEL 7 hosts that will provide advice. These tools are under rapid development as they encounter all the interesting things we do on our servers out in the wild :-)