Red Hat (and CIQ) Offer Extended Support for RHEL 7 (and CentOS 7)

This week, The Register reported: If you are still running RHEL 7, which is now approaching a decade old, there's good news. Red Hat is offering four more years of support for RHEL 7.9, which it terms Extended Life Cycle Support or ELS.

If you are running the free version, CentOS Linux 7, that hits its end-of-life on the same date: June 30, 2024. CIQ, which offers CentOS Linux rebuild Rocky Linux, has a life cycle extension for that too, which it calls CIQ Bridge. The company told The Reg: "CIQ Bridge, essentially a long-term support service tailored for CentOS 7 users on the migration path to Rocky Linux, is offered under an annual, fixed-rate subscription. CIQ Bridge includes access to CentOS 7 extended life package updates for an additional three years and security updates for CVSS 7 issues and above. Security updates for CVSS 5 and 6 are available at an elevated subscription tier. CIQ Bridge is designed to support CentOS 7 users until they are ready for CIQ guidance and support in migration to Rocky Linux." CIQ believes there's a substantial market for this, and points to research from Enlyft that suggests hundreds of thousands of users still on CentOS Linux 7.

Hooray

[OrangeTide]

I mean I spent a significant amount of time last year trying to wrangle alternatives to CentOS and RHEL 7 for my customers. But great news, I can tell the last one to buy an ELS and leave me alone. RH was dead set on killing this stuff off shortly after they bought CentOS.

Re:

[DMDx86]

I don't know the marketshare numbers but RHEL is still under active development (not just maintenance, but actual releases with new features). It's not dead or dying or being abandoned.

RHEL is what you use if you need actual support that is comparable to what you used to get from traditional UNIX vendors like Sun and most of the enterprise software out there targets RHEL. RHEL having been and continuing to be the standard in enterprise is why it continues to be cloned despite Red Hat's efforts to stymie it.

Re:

[ctilsie242]

I have seen a large migration from RHEL to Ubuntu, especially with Ubuntu Pro providing 24/7. However, RHEL excels at a few things, like offline/air-gapped installations, as well as things like FreeIPA/IdM, Ansible Tower, and other items.

However, Ubuntu is making headway, because it is so popular, and usually someone found a way to handle most issues with it, somewhere.

SLES is also making headway. I've seen SuSE getting into some markets as well.

Wish RH would start adapting to what people are griping abou

Re:

[OrangeTide]

RH is good for OpenShift and OperatorHub, as well.

Re:

[kriston]

Does ELS cover CentOS 7?
The Slashdot summary says it only covers RHEL 7 and the article states that something else from Rocky Linux called CIQ Bridge covers CentOS for three years.

Why would you need that?

[gweihir]

Linux is the most painless OS to update in general and if you were somewhat professional in application development that includes applications being unaffected.

Re:

[supremebob]

In-place upgrades of CentOS/RHEL from one major version to another is not officially supported. You can try it anyway, but you might end up with a "frankenserver" with installed packages from both OS versions that will refuse to patch properly. Been there, done that, not fun.

Re: Why would you need that?

[strawspulled]

Yes they are. You can upgrade from 7 to 8 to 9 using LEAPP.

Re:

[93 Escort Wagon]

I can tell you from personal experience that LEAPP is not bullet-proof.

However installing a major version isn't that big a deal - especially if you partition your machines wisely and use something like ansible to store/handle your configuration. ... which you probably should be doing anyway, at least if you have more than a couple servers.

Re:

[internet-redstar]

Indeed, LEAPP in itself is not great. But our Project78 software builds upon it to deal with its shortcomings for large scale enterprises. We have already upgraded thousands of heterogenous Linux servers at our customers and performed +10.000 lab upgrades to validate our custom recipes dealing with most common third party software. Here you can find out more: https://www.project78.com/ [project78.com] And the differences between LEAPP and Project78: https://docs.google.com/spread... [google.com]

Re:

[gweihir]

What? Are you serious?

Re:

[DMDx86]

Red Hat themselves begs to differ.

https://access.redhat.com/docu... [redhat.com]

Re:

[ctilsie242]

Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't. I have done major version upgrades with RHEL, and have wound up having to go clean up a lot of cruft. RPM hell is really a nasty thing to deal with. Maybe it is better with RHEL 9, but the amount of hoops I had to jump through to get RPMs working (nuke the RPM database entry, but leave the files, because the entry was a critical library, install it, do force installs, and so on until all the prereqs are okay.) Ultimately, easier to just reinstall. This is why it is

Re:Why would you need that?

[gweihir]

Well, I have done automatic updates with Debian for about 20 years now (every week, several servers), with one smaller problem so far. I habe done manual release updates for Debian countless times and never a failure so far, and that is in some instances with custom kernels and no initrd and no systemd (i.e. not the main supported config). Are you telling me RHEL is that much harder to maintain?

Re:

[msk]

Yes, RHEL is that much harder than Debian to maintain.

You can even do an in-place switch from Debian to Devuan, thus ridding yourself of systemd.

Re:

[gweihir]

Interesting. The one time I worked with RHEL it felt clunky, restricted and inflexible. May have been an accurate impression then.

I know about updating Debian to Devuan and have done it. At the moment I run both Devuan and non-systemd Debian. May switch over completely in a few months or so.

I would be more interested in support for 6.5

[walterbyrd]

IMO: 6.5 was the last good release, it's all been downhill since then.