Red Hat has announced an additional four years of support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7), bringing the total support period to 14 years.

Ubuntu recently expanded its optional support window for Ubuntu LTS to 12 years, up from the previous 10. Not to be outdone, Red Hat says REHL 7 is eligible for a total of 14 years, up from its original 10. The company announced the change in a blog post, acknowledging that much has changed since RHEL 7 was released, raising new challenges for IT organizations.

As we near the end of the standard 10-year life cycle of RHEL 7, some IT organizations are finding that they cannot complete their planned migrations before June 30, 2024. To support IT teams while they catch up on their migration schedules, Red Hat is announcing a one-time, 4 year ELS maintenance period for RHEL 7 ELS. While Red Hat is providing more time, we strongly recommend customers migrate to a newer version of RHEL to take advantage of new features and enhancements.

As the company goes on to highlight, each major version of RHEL receives 10 years of support. The first give includes “full support, including bug fixes, security patches, software enhancements, hardware enablement and backports.” The next five years focuses mainly on security patches and bug fixes.

After this, RHEL enters the Extended Life Phase (ELP). During this time, you have continued access to previously-released content on the Red Hat Customer Portal and the Red Hat Knowledgebase. Additionally, we may provide limited ongoing technical support and advice for migrating to currently supported RHEL versions.

For organizations that need to remain on a major release beyond the standard life cycle, we offer the Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) Add-On. This add-on currently extends support of major releases for up to 2 years after the end of the standard release life cycle. As an optional, add-on subscription, ELS gives you access to troubleshooting for the last minor release, selected urgent priority bug fixes and certain Red Hat-defined security fixes.

As Red Hat point out, the additional support period will give organizations the necessary time to update.

Over the last decade, RHEL 7 has become a staple in many IT organizations, providing a more consistent, trusted platform for hybrid cloud workloads. With 4 years of ELS for RHEL 7, you can revise and execute your migration plans based on your schedule, while continuing to receive the support you need to protect your critical workloads.