Chapter 1. Overview

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is now in the Maintenance Support 2 phase of the product life cycle. New functionality and new hardware enablement are not planned for availability in this phase. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.9 therefore provides a stable release focused on bug fixes. Subsequent updates will be limited to qualified critical security fixes and business-impacting urgent issues. Please refer to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Life Cycle for more information.

As Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions are not tied to a particular release, existing customers can update their Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 infrastructure to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 at any time, free of charge, to take advantage of recent upstream innovations. To simplify the upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, Red Hat provides the Preupgrade Assistant and Red Hat Upgrade Tool. For more information, see Chapter 2, General Updates.

Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.7, the Red Hat Insights service is available. Red Hat Insights is a proactive service designed to enable you to identify, examine, and resolve known technical issues before they affect your deployment. Insights leverages the combined knowledge of Red Hat Support Engineers, documented solutions, and resolved issues to deliver relevant, actionable information to system administrators.

The service is hosted and delivered through the customer portal at https://access.redhat.com/insights/ or through Red Hat Satellite. To register your systems, follow the Getting Started Guide for Insights. For further information, data security and limits, refer to https://access.redhat.com/insights/splash/.

Red Hat Customer Portal Labs is a set of tools in a section of the Customer Portal available at https://access.redhat.com/labs/. The applications in Red Hat Customer Portal Labs can help you improve performance, quickly troubleshoot issues, identify security problems, and quickly deploy and configure complex applications. Some of the most popular applications are, for example: