At the Red Hat Summit, the company announced an extended support period for its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) products. This is good news for server owners.
Red Hat announced that it will add another year of support, raising the total to 4 from 3 years, for RHEL products version 4 and higher.
This is good news as it gives some added lifetime to your server. Upgrading between major OS’s of RHEL has never been easy or recommended by Red Hat.
In their road map, Red Hat said that RHEL 4 and 5 will benefit from another year of support. This means the versions will continue to receive minor releases about twice per year with new hardware updates, general bug fixing and additional features for a year longer than normal.
CentOS owners will benefit as well since that distro is derived from RHEL.
I first read this over on Dag’s blog as I’ve been out of the loop on RHEL news lately.
This is a boon for RHEL 4 owners as a large number of dedicated server providers have been preferentially using that version as their default install.
If you have a leased server, you will probably find it is running RHEL 4 and this will let you continue to use that system for another year. Typically, control panel vendors like Parallels, the makers of Plesk, follow in Red Hat’s foot steps when it comes to support.