Red Hat Extends RHEL 7 Support by an Additional 4 Years

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Linux distributions targeted at the corporate sector tend to offer many years of support, about ten years to be more precise, but lately it seems that companies are competing to extend the maintenance of some older versions. This is where Red Hat comes in, having announced an Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) that provides an additional four years of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

The IBM subsidiary reminded in the official announcement that all releases of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) follow a standard ten-year lifecycle. The first five years offer full support, covering fixes for software bugs, security patches, software enhancements, hardware enablement, and backported patches, while the following five years focus on maintaining around security patches and bug fixes.

The version of RHEL that has completed its standard lifecycle moves into the Extended Life Phase, in which there is continuous access to previously published content on Red Hat's customer portal and the company's knowledge base. Additionally, limited ongoing technical support and advice for migrating to a supported RHEL version may be provided.

This is where the new Extended Lifecycle comes into play, primarily aimed at organizations that need to stay on the same version of RHEL beyond its standard lifecycle. It is an add-on that extends support and provides access to solutions for the latest minor release, selected urgent priority bug fixes, and certain security fixes defined by Red Hat.

Regarding the security patches provided through ELS, Red Hat reminds that it classifies the risk of security breaches into four categories: low, moderate, important, and critical. Users who opt for the add-on will receive patches for Critical Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) that have been classified as important and critical, as the important ones can compromise the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of resources, and the critical ones can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker and compromise systems without user interaction.

For organizations unable to complete migrations from RHEL 7 by June 30, 2024, the date when the standard support cycle for that system ends, Red Hat has made ELS available to provide four more years of support, although the company recommends using that time to undertake a migration to a more recent version of RHEL to have full support for updates. RHEL 7.9 must be used to access ELS.

"Compared to previous major releases, ELS for RHEL 7 (RHEL 7.9) expands the scope of security fixes to include updates that address important CVEs. It also includes maintenance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for SAP solutions and add-ons for high availability and resilient storage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux." The IBM subsidiary also plans to bring ELS to RHEL versions 8 and 9, but with support that would last three years.

Seeing that RHEL 7 was released in a stable phase in 2014, the ELS version available for it extends its support until 2028, so it would ultimately have a total of fourteen years of support. This move by Red Hat can be seen by some as a response to Canonical, which last March announced it was extending support for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to twelve years.

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