With each Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscription, customers can also purchase various add-ons, including extended update support, resilient storage, high availability, or smart management. Premium support is available around the clock for Severity 1 and 2 issues, which include problems that severely impact the use of the software in a production environment and problems where the software is functioning but its functionality in a production environment is severely reduced. Red Hat’s initial and ongoing response times with Standard support range from 1 business hour to 2 business day, depending on the severity of the issue. Standard support is available only during Red Hat’s business hours, which are either 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM local time for North America or 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM for outside of North America. With one year of Standard support, the price jumps to $799 per year, and one year of Premium support increases it further, to $1,299 per year.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscriptions start at $349 per year without any support from Red Hat. To deploy RHEL on a server or workstation, one has to purchase a subscription from Red Hat and renew it every year. The distribution is currently available in five server versions (for x86, x86-64, Itanium, PowerPC and IBM System z) and two desktop versions (for x86 and x86-64).Īlthough the source code of RHEL is freely available, Red Hat restricts the redistribution of their officially supported versions of RHEL.
RHEL started in 2000 as a Linux distribution targeted toward the commercial market. By the end of it, you will know everything you need to know about RHEL and CentOS and be able to choose between them depending on your needs. If you have been in that position yourself or are not sure how you would answer if a CFO or someone you know asked you about the difference between RHEL and CentOS, this article is for you. Every day, somewhere in the world, a server administrator has to explain to a CFO the difference between Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and CentOS because the two Linux distributions look shockingly similar, but one is free and the other one is not.