Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Approaches End of Life

Red Hat has announced that its Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 3 offering is entering its last six months of limited support. After October 31st, 2010, there will be no more updates issued or support offered for the aging release. The EOL (end of life) announcement also involves CentOS 3, indirectly, as it is based on RHEL 3.

“In accordance with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Errata Support Policy, the regular 7 year life-cycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 will end on October 31, 2010,” the official announcement reads. “After this date, Red Hat will discontinue the regular subscription services for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3. Therefore, new bug fix, enhancement, and security errata updates, as well as technical support services will no longer be available,” the EOL notice continues.

Products affected by the RHEL 3 EOL:

· Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 3;
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES 3;
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS 3;
· Red Hat Enterprise Linux Extras 3;
· Red Hat Desktop 3;
· Red Hat Global File System 3;
· Red Hat Cluster Suite 3.

Red Had advises all customers that are still running on products based on RHEL 3 to upgrade to the latest stable version, RHEL 5, before the EOL date to ensure they can still benefit from support, updates and security fixes. The company says that it may offer those that, for whatever reason, can’t upgrade their infrastructure, prolonged limited support on a case-by-case basis.

RHEL 3 approaches the end of the seven-year life-cycle. It is now in the last phase, “Production 3,“ which offered limited update support. Security patches are still launched and bug fixes are released on a regular basis. That will all end on October 31st this year. RHEL 4 users have two more years of support as the Production 3 phase ends on February 29th, 2012.