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. The updates are 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.

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. To perform an in-place upgrade, use the Preupgrade Assistant, a utility that checks the system for upgrade issues before running the actual upgrade, and that also provides additional scripts for the Red Hat Upgrade Tool. When you have solved all the problems reported by the Preupgrade Assistant, use the Red Hat Upgrade Tool to upgrade the system.

For details regarding procedures and supported scenarios, see the Upgrading from RHEL 6 to RHEL 7 guide.

Note that the Preupgrade Assistant and the Red Hat Upgrade Tool are available in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 Extras repository.

For instructions on upgrading from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 see the Upgrading from RHEL 6 to RHEL 8 document.

If you are using CentOS Linux 6 or Oracle Linux 6, you can convert your operating system to RHEL 6 using the convert2rhel utility prior to upgrading to RHEL 7 or RHEL 8. For instructions, see How to convert from CentOS Linux or Oracle Linux to RHEL.

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 or through Red Hat Satellite. To register your systems, follow the Getting Started Guide for Insights.

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: