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Chapter 1. Overview

Product life cycle

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.9 is the last minor release of RHEL 7.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 entered the Maintenance Support 2 phase of the product life cycle on August 6, 2020. See the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle document for more information.

In-place upgrade

An in-place upgrade offers a way of upgrading a system to a new major release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux by replacing the existing operating system. For a list of currently supported upgrade pahts, see Supported in-place upgrade paths for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In-place upgrade from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7

The Preupgrade Assistant and Red Hat Upgrade Tool have been updated with the release of RHEL 7.9:

  • The supported in-place upgrade path is from RHEL 6.10 to RHEL 7.9, with the exception of SAP HANA.
  • In-place upgrade of UEFI-based RHEL installations is now supported
  • The rollback functionality is available also for UEFI
  • You can use custom repositories for an in-place upgrade

The procedure of an in-place upgrade from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7 and the usage of the Preupgrade Assistant and the Red Hat Upgrade Tool is documented in the Upgrading from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7 guide. Significant differences between the two major releases are documented in the Migration Planning Guide. Note that the Preupgrade Assistant and the Red Hat Upgrade Tool are available in the RHEL 6 Extras repository.

If you are using CentOS Linux 6 or Oracle Linux 6, you can convert your operating system to RHEL 6 using the unsupported Convert2RHEL utility prior to upgrading to RHEL 7. For instructions, see How to convert from CentOS Linux or Oracle Linux to RHEL.

In-place upgrade from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8

Instructions on how to perform an in-place upgrade from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 using the Leapp utility are provided by the document Upgrading from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8. Major differences between RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 are documented in Considerations in adopting RHEL 8. The Leapp utility is available in the RHEL 7 Extras repository.

If you are using CentOS Linux 7 or Oracle Linux 7, you can convert your operating system to RHEL 7 using the Red Hat-supported Convert2RHEL utility prior to upgrading to RHEL 8. For instructions, see Converting from a Linux distribution to RHEL using the Convert2RHEL utility. For information regarding how Red Hat supports conversions from other Linux distributions to RHEL, see the Convert2RHEL Support Policy document.

Additional resources

  • The Package Manifest document provides a package listing for RHEL 7.
  • The Red Hat Insights service, which enables you to identify, examine, and resolve known technical issues, is now available with all RHEL subscriptions. For instructions on how to install the Red Hat Insights client and register your system to the service, see the Red Hat Insights Get Started page.
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