Chapter 1. System requirements and supported architectures
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 delivers a stable, secure, consistent foundation across hybrid cloud deployments with the tools needed to deliver workloads faster with less effort. You can deploy RHEL as a guest on supported hypervisors and Cloud provider environments as well as on physical infrastructure, so your applications can take advantage of innovations in the leading hardware architecture platforms.
Review the guidelines provided for system, hardware, security, memory, and RAID before installing.
If you want to use your system as a virtualization host, review the necessary hardware requirements for virtualization.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports the following architectures:
- AMD and Intel 64-bit architectures
- The 64-bit ARM architecture
- IBM Power Systems, Little Endian
- 64-bit IBM Z architectures
1.1. Supported installation targets
An installation target is a storage device that stores Red Hat Enterprise Linux and boots the system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports the following installation targets for IBMZ , IBM Power, AMD64, Intel 64, and 64-bit ARM systems:
- Storage connected by a standard internal interface, such as DASD, SCSI, SATA, or SAS
- BIOS/firmware RAID devices on the Intel64, AMD64 and arm64 architectures
-
NVDIMM devices in sector mode on the Intel64 and AMD64 architectures, supported by the
nd_pmemdriver. - Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters and multipath devices. Some can require vendor-provided drivers.
- Xen block devices on Intel processors in Xen virtual machines.
- VirtIO block devices on Intel processors in KVM virtual machines.
Red Hat does not support installation to USB drives or SD memory cards. For information about support for third-party virtualization technologies, see the Red Hat Hardware Compatibility List.
1.2. Disk and memory requirements
If several operating systems are installed, it is important that you verify that the allocated disk space is separate from the disk space required by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In some cases, it is important to dedicate specific partitions to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, for example, for AMD64, Intel 64, and 64-bit ARM, at least two partitions (/ and swap) must be dedicated to RHEL and for IBM Power Systems servers, at least three partitions (/, swap, and a PReP boot partition) must be dedicated to RHEL.
Additionally, you must have a minimum of 10 GiB of available disk space. To install Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you must have a minimum of 10 GiB of space in either unpartitioned disk space or in partitions that can be deleted. For more information, see Partitioning reference.
| Installation type | Minimum RAM |
|---|---|
| Local media installation (USB, DVD) |
|
| NFS network installation |
|
| HTTP, HTTPS or FTP network installation |
|
It is possible to complete the installation with less memory than the minimum requirements. The exact requirements depend on your environment and installation path. Test various configurations to determine the minimum required RAM for your environment. Installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux using a Kickstart file has the same minimum RAM requirements as a standard installation. However, additional RAM may be required if your Kickstart file includes commands that require additional memory, or write data to the RAM disk.
1.3. Graphics display resolution requirements
Your system must have the following minimum resolution to ensure a smooth and error-free installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
| Product version | Resolution |
|---|---|
| Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 | Minimum: 800 x 600 Recommended: 1026 x 768 |
1.4. UEFI Secure Boot and Beta release requirements
If you plan to install a Beta release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, on systems having UEFI Secure Boot enabled, then first disable the UEFI Secure Boot option and then begin the installation.
UEFI Secure Boot requires that the operating system kernel is signed with a recognized private key, which the system’s firmware verifies using the corresponding public key. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux Beta releases, the kernel is signed with a Red Hat Beta-specific public key, which the system fails to recognize by default. As a result, the system fails to even boot the installation media.
Additional resources
- For information about installing RHEL on IBM, see IBM installation documentation
- Security hardening
- Composing a customized RHEL system image
- Red Hat ecosystem catalog
- RHEL technology capabilities and limits
