ClickCease Extended Lifecycle Support for CentOS 7 | TuxCare

CentOS 7 continues to live today supporting millions of workloads. Sure, you won’t get a new version of CentOS with new features, but CentOS 7 works fine as-is. But wait, no more security updates after June 2024? Well, that could be a problem… and that’s where TuxCare will come to the rescue.

TuxCare is providing security patches for CentOS 6 and 8 and will do so for CentOS 7 as well, starting June 2024. We’ve been offering extended lifecycle support for CentOS Linux since November 2020 and will make CentOS 7 end of life a non-event when it comes.

We’re in it for the long haul and we’re already covering more than 100,000 Linux nodes. In December 2021, we extended support for CentOS 8 for another 4 years, and we’ll do that for CentOS 7 in 2024.

So don’t sweat it.

Just keep on going with CentOS 6, 7, or 8.
TuxCare has your back.

What is changing with CentOS 7?

In December 2020 Red Hat Software, the company that sponsored the CentOS community project, announced it will no longer produce stable releases of the CentOS project to match the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) release. Red Hat now only supports the upstream vendor release CentOS Stream, which is a rolling release, a preview of RHEL.

The major version CentOS 8 was to be the last stable community release of the RHEL clone, with no minor versions to follow, and Red Hat accelerated its end of life date to December 2021. CentOS 7 support continues to June 2024, but there is no CentOS stable release to switch to after that.

What are the implications?

You still have a couple of years to migrate, but the clock is ticking. Ordinarily, you’d simply migrate to CentOS 8 within the available time frame – i.e., before July 2024. But, CentOS 8 is now already end of life, so shifting to CentOS 8 is not an option – and there won’t be a CentOS 9.

For most enterprise users and production workloads, CentOS Stream is not an option outside of a development platform. Its rolling nature means it isn’t an exact copy of the matching RHEL release so application compatibility can easily break. You need to either switch to another Linux distribution or find a way to extend CentOS 7 support.

Finding an alternative means testing all your existing workloads and tools on a different distribution - and this is a long term operation that requires extensive planning.

Talk To An CentOs 7 Expert

And remember, just because no more updates will be coming for CentOS 7 after it’s end of life
date, that does not mean that new vulnerabilities won’t emerge. There has been an uptick of
vulnerabilities affecting old operating system versions, and older software in general, simply
because code is being more closely checked.

Understanding extended lifecycle support

It’s simple: extended life cycle support takes the manufacturer end of life date and extends it several years into the future. Whenever a new flaw or vulnerability is found TuxCare’s team rolls out a patch and provides updates just the same way the vendor would have.

So, even when the vendor has stopped supporting an OS, you still enjoy regular patches as if nothing has changed. The in-house TuxCare team produces patches of the same quality as the original vendor patches, and releases patches just as fast – if not even faster – than the vendor did.

Talk To An CentOs 7 Expert

After June 2024, you can rely on TuxCare for critical CentOS 7 patches and updates to replace the official Red Hat support:

An SLA guarantee for the most critical CVEs, and consistently fast patch delivery for everything else.
Professional support available through a customer portal 24/7, and dedicated technical account management.
Fully compatible with your existing infrastructure, just swap TuxCare ELS into place with a simple script.
Benefit from more than a decade of Linux systems experience thanks to the CloudLinux OS team – creators of TuxCare.
System administrators keep infrastructure always-on thanks to optional rebootless installation.
Keep running CentOS 7 just as you were and buy more time to migrate to an alternative Linux distribution for your Linux servers.
All your existing tools continue to work just as before - it’s just a different repository for updates.

Switching to TuxCare for CentOS 7 support is simple

As 2024 approaches you can rest assured that switching from Red Hat’s official support for CentOS 7 to TuxCare extended lifecycle support is straightforward. Just run a single script and TuxCare will continuously provide the latest patches into your CentOS 7 servers – giving you more time to decide what to do after CentOS 7. You can even create a local mirror to store all our CentOS 7 support updates using rsync. Your maintenance processes won’t be affected - you’ll continue to use your tool of choice for patch deployment (yum, dnf, etc).

Supported packages

TuxCare will extend support for CentOS 7 across a number of areas including Apache and PHP. We will also update Python and Glibc as well as OpenSSL,

OpenSSH. Additional commonly used packages will also be update, including...

  • acl
  • acpid
  • attr
  • authconfig
  • basesystem
  • bash
  • bc
  • gd
  • blktrace
  • bridge-utils
  • busybox
  • bzip2
  • crash
  • cyrus-imapd
  • cyrus-sasl.
  • device-mapper
  • dhclient
  • dhcpv6
  • dmidecode
  • dovecot
  • ed
  • gcc
  • gdb
  • glib2
  • glibc
  • httpd
  • info
  • Iptstate
  • lslk
  • mysql
  • openssh
  • php
  • userspace packages
  • zlib

… and many others.

Every major Enterprise Linux Distribution
is covered by TuxCare ELS

TuxCare delivers Extended Lifecycle Support for many commonly used Linux distributions, including
CentOS release 6 and 8, Oracle Linux 6, as well as Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

Extended Lifecycle Support for CentOS 8

End of life: December 2021

CentOS 8 is no longer officially supported, but you can enjoy ongoing support through January 2026 – buying time to switch distributions, while keeping your workload safe.

Extended Lifecycle Support for Oracle Enterprise Linux 6

End of life: March 2021

For Oracle Enterprise Linux, TuxCare delivers ongoing extended support until December 2024. It’s a significantly more affordable option compared to Oracle’s Premier

Extended Lifecycle Support for Ubuntu 16.04

End of life: April 2021

Choose TuxCare for Ubuntu 16.04 extended support and save significantly over an Ubuntu subscription, with updates for your Ubuntu workloads lasting until April 2025.

Frequently Asked Questions About CentOs 7

Getting worried about your CentOS 7 workloads? Keep an eye on TuxCare extended lifecycle support. We’re ready to take over in 2024 so you can continue to enjoy safe and secure computing with extended support for patches and fixes.

Getting worried about your CentOS 7 workloads? Keep an eye on TuxCare extended lifecycle support. We’re ready to take over in 2024 so you can continue to enjoy safe and secure computing with extended support for patches and fixes.

Getting worried about your CentOS 7 workloads? Keep an eye on TuxCare extended lifecycle support. We’re ready to take over in 2024 so you can continue to enjoy safe and secure computing with extended support for patches and fixes.

Getting worried about your CentOS 7 workloads? Keep an eye on TuxCare extended lifecycle support. We’re ready to take over in 2024 so you can continue to enjoy safe and secure computing with extended support for patches and fixes.

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