Smoothing the transition: CentOS Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

On June 30, 2024, CentOS Linux 7 will reach End of Life (EOL). Explore Red Hat’s options to help ease your migration, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 for Third Party Linux Migration. Find out more

CentOS Linux is a community-supported distribution derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is functionally comparable with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is widely deployed across on-premise data centers and in public cloud environments. CentOS Linux 7 will reach its end of life (EOL) on June 30, 2024¹. Systems running CentOS Linux 7 will stop receiving software updates and patches from the CentOS community after this time. Red Hat understands the challenges this presents to the CentOS Linux user base; particularly to those users who have deployed CentOS Linux 7 for business critical workloads. What is needed is the knowledge of a path from which to move forward.

Red Hat is pleased to announce our new offering Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third Party Linux Migration, which is a set of new offerings that are designed to assist users of CentOS Linux 7 to maintain continuity after June 30, 2024. These offerings are competitively priced and include tooling and best practices to convert in-place instances of CentOS Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. They also allow users to receive software updates for at least two additional years after the CentOS Linux 7 EOL date.

Once these migrated instances are deployed for production, organizations may also qualify for a no-cost subscription of RHEL for certain development use cases via the Red Hat Developer Subscription for Teams. These offerings will provide users the knowledge and wherewithal to preserve their investments in infrastructure and gain additional time to plan their upgrade to the current version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We believe in the value of our subscription and the value that it brings to our clients. We've built the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription to include long-term life cycle support that provides an unparalleled offering with exceptional customer experience. All of this delivers flexible and stable performance and the security for fulfilling business requirements. Organizations can choose from multiple supported versions, upgrade on their schedule, and adopt new features as needed. Red Hat maintains consistent hardware, feature and binary compatibility and maintains a predictable kernel version for each major release and its associated minor releases, ensuring application and hardware stability throughout the release life cycle. Red Hat also provides in-place upgrade tools to help organizations migrate to newer versions of RHEL more easily when customers are ready to do so available for either on-prem, in the cloud or both.

Where can this new offering be purchased?
 
Red Hat not only provides the opportunity to purchase our solutions for on-premise and the cloud through our dedicated sales teams, partners and the Red Hat website purchasing programs, but also through numerous cloud marketplaces including AWS, Azure and Google.

AWS:
“AWS is committed to provide customers flexibility and security for operating systems running on AWS Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2). Available later this year on AWS Marketplace, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third Party Linux Migration will include the necessary tools for customers to perform in-place migration from CentOS Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7,” says Fred Wurden, VP, EC2 commercial software services.

Google:
“Google Cloud provides reliable, secure, and versatile infrastructure and operating system options to customers. As part of our continued partnership with Red Hat, we are excited to offer Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third Party Linux Migration, which will allow CentOS Linux 7 users to maintain continuity after the June 30, 2024 EOL date by providing a migration path to RHEL 7,” says Mark Lohmeyer, VP of Compute at Google Cloud.

Microsoft Azure:
“Microsoft is focused on streamlining customers’ IT migrations and operations. As part of our continued partnership with Red Hat, including Azure-hosted Red Hat infrastructure, the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third Party Linux Migration will be available in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Our offer includes access to an additional two years of updates and patches to enable CentOS Linux 7 customers to more easily migrate to RHEL 7 and maintain continuity past the June 30, 2024 EOL date with a supported and highly secure Linux distribution,” says Jeremy Winter, Corporate Vice President, Azure program management, at Microsoft.

In short, Red Hat has created a way for users to move to a supported operating system that has all of the tooling in place for a consistent experience; giving you the knowledge and technology you need as you approach the CentOS Linux 7 EOL. To learn more about moving from CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from a tactical point of view, check out our recent blog, Fastest road from CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

¹ https://wiki.centos.org/About/Product