What to know about CentOS Linux EOL

CentOS Linux 7 will reach end of life (EOL) on June 30, 2024. This article will cover what that means, how you can prepare, and how Red Hat can help ease your migration.

CentOS Linux is a freely available, community-supported Linux distribution that was developed, distributed, and maintained by the CentOS Project community contributors. It was derived from Red Hat^® Enterprise Linux^® sources and released in alignment with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux release cycle. CentOS Linux is not a product of Red Hat and does not have Red Hat support.

In 2020, The CentOS Project, in coordination with Red Hat, announced that it would shift full investment to CentOS Stream, the upstream development platform for upcoming Red Hat Enterprise Linux releases. As a result, CentOS Linux 7 will reach end of life (EOL) on June 30, 2024. 

End of life (EOL) occurs when a product or service is discontinued. Organizations that use the product will have to migrate to a new solution to continue receiving updates and security patches.

If you are running CentOS Linux 7, you should migrate to a new operating system before June 30, 2024 to continue receiving security updates, patches, and new features. 

Because CentOS Linux was derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sources, users migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux can continue to use many of the same techniques and elements with minimal training, while also gaining more features, tools, support, and value. Here are some options to ease your transition. To further assist in your migration planning and execution, the CentOS Linux migration assessment is available to evaluate your current CentOS Linux setup and provide for a smooth shift to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third Party Linux Migration

Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third Party Linux Migration is a new offering designed to assist users of CentOS Linux 7 to maintain business continuity after the EOL date. This competitively-priced offering includes a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription and tooling to convert in-place instances of CentOS Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

Convert2RHEL for migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Convert2RHEL is a no-cost, fully supported migration tool that simplifies the migration process while maintaining existing customizations, configurations, and preferences.This command line utility converts RPM-based Linux operating systems to a fully supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS. It minimizes the need for costly redeployment projects and reduces the burden on system administrators by automatically identifying and replacing OS packages in CentOS Linux with RHEL equivalents. It’s an automated way to convert to Red Hat Enterprise Linux — instead of manually redeploying all your workloads.

Migrating from CentOS Linux with Red Hat Insights

Organizations migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux now have a simpler way to convert using an online service. Find out how to get pre-conversion guidance specific to your environment with these step-by-step instructions. 

Red Hat Consulting

For large environments or organizations with limited resources, you can engage Red Hat Consulting to help accelerate your migration. Red Hat experts bring proven knowledge and experience to your migration project. We can help you identify and convert key applications and workloads, and we mentor and enable you to continue confidently afterward. 

It is crucial to have an OS that is reliable and stable. To scale and get consistent performance, you need the confidence that comes with a defined maintenance and update schedule, full support, and built-in security features.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an open source Linux distribution that provides consistency across footprints whether your organization is deploying new applications, moving existing applications from the datacenter to a cloud environment, or simply migrating off another Linux distribution. It’s the reliable replacement for CentOS Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides higher value and minimizes overall costs over time by providing a defined maintenance and update schedule, full support, security resources, a large ecosystem of certified partners, management tools, and long-term roadmaps–with a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) over time compared to an unpaid, unsupported OS¹. It delivers consistency across the open hybrid cloud–including physical, virtual, private clouds, public clouds, and edge deployments. 

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux cloud experience provides the same superior security, performance, scalability, and reliability our customers have come to expect using it on-premise. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux naturally provides a similar user experience to CentOS Linux versions and requires little retraining for CentOS Linux users. Benefit from a vast hardware, software, and cloud partner ecosystem of certified solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the only Linux supported by Red Hat’s 24x7 global support team. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps to streamline compliance standards for organizations with highly-regulated environments, security guides, and security policies. It provides a consistent and independently validated and certified solution and delivers compliance tools as part of the OS to easily deploy security baselines at scale. In 2022, Red Hat announced a new Common Criteria Certification for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, further strengthening Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a platform of choice for users with critical workloads in classified and sensitive deployments. 

It is certified for use and compatibility with hundreds of cloud providers, including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform so you can choose the best IT infrastructure options for your business. The large ecosystem of certified solutions allows you to customize hybrid cloud environments, including software and services from providers like SAP.

^{2 - IDC White Paper, sponsored by Red Hat. “The Business Value of Red Hat Solutions Compared to Unpaid Alternatives.” April 2021. Document #US47607721.} 

Benefits of migrating CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Value of Red Hat solutions versus non-paid alternatives

IDC: Economic Impact of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Converting CentOS Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Interactive Lab: Migrate to Red Hat Enterprise Linux from CentOS Linux

Webinar: CentOS Linux is reaching its end of life. Now what?

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