Red Hat now supports RHEL 5 and 6 for a decade
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Companies that like Red Hat Enterprise Linux but hate changing Linux versions because of the hardware and software qualification process just got an excuse to be lazy for the next decade.
Red Hat has announced that it will extend the production life of its latest RHEL 6 releases and the prior RHEL 5 releases by an extra three years, with a full decade of support – up from seven years.
"Enterprise customers require flexibility when planning strategic, long-term technology deployments," Jim Totton, vice president and general manager of the platform business unit at Red Hat said in a statement announcing the change. "Many of our customers have come to realize that standardizing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux improves efficiency and helps lower costs. With a 10-year life cycle, customers now have additional choices when planning their Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployment and overall IT strategy. We are pleased that customers are looking far into the future with Red Hat.”
The 10-year production life of RHEL 5 and RHEL 6 runs from the general availability of a each major release of the Linux operating system stack from Shadowman.
With RHEL 3 and 4, Red Hat offered four years of what it calls production phase 1support, under which it provides full support, including backporting important new Linux features to prior kernels to maintain application compatibility as well as support for new hardware, software enhancements in the stack, updated installation images, and security and bug fixes. Production phase 2 support does limited new hardware support but software in the stack is not updated and neither are installation images. Production phase 3 lasts about two years, and now minor releases are not tweaked (just the major ones) and new hardware is only enabled through virtualization hypervisors. (Meaning if you want new hardware support, you have to run your RHEL in virtual mode in a KVM or Xen partition.) After these seven years were up on RHEL 3 and 4, you had the option to pay for extended life support (which does not have human tech support) and extended update support (which does).
With today's update to the RHEL5 and 6 lifecycle, Shadowman is now stretching the initial, full-on support level for RHEL to five-and-a-half years, offering phase two for the same one year, and tacking on another six months onto production support phase three, for a total of a decade of production support. The extended support options are still maxed out at three years.
The production lifecycle for RHEL was at parity with Canonical's Ubuntu Server Long Term Support (LTS) releases, which have five years of coverage. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 was launched in March 2009 with a Service Pack 1 update in March 2010, and it is currently supported through March 2016, which is the seven-year range that Red Hat is offering. (The SUSE Linux unit of Attachmate offers self-support through March 2019 on SLES 11 SP1.)
Red Hat is probably not as much interested in keeping parity with SUSE Linux as it is interested in keeping RHEL customers who are happy with their systems to keep paying for support instead of going to self-support. The original RHEL 5.0 came out in March 2007 and was coming up on its five-year end-of-production support, and RHEL 5.1 comes up on its fifth birthday this coming November. By extending the production level support on RHEL 5 by 18 months, Red Hat now gets that much more time to get these customers to move on up to RHEL 6 – rather than slipping from fee to free. ®
COMMENTS
Bigger version Number
Bigger Numbers FTW
Unless like me you are one of the first people to get Windows ME and showcase to all your friends how big a FAIL it really was. Yeah I think the "Don't fix what isnt broken" quote fits well here.
The future?
Looking far into the future and not liking what they see with the new gnome? I'm still using Fedora 14 and see no reason to change. My software runs just the way I want it to. Really, what advantage is there to upgrade my desktop os? and don't say because the new gui is easier to use.
This is very useful for organisations that have a scalable structure
Rather than being stuck with three years of support and upgrades you can run hardware for a lot longer.
There is no logical reason for throwing out good hardware every three or four years just to go after the next big thing. I bet most reg readers have electronic equipment that is over ten years old (I'm still running Red Hat Linux 9 on a Pentium 133...)
It is far easier to get old hardware (even if you resort to buying it on eBay) and install on that what you know works than to go through the pain of testing a new kernel on new hardware.
This is of course why Cobol is still very much alive. The pain of replacing it exceeds the savings that would result.
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