RHEL 6 end of maintenance

What do I need to know

After this date, the following changes take effect:

  • RHEL 6 images will still be available but will be marked as deprecated.
  • For your existing PAYG RHEL 6 license based VMs, limited technical support is available through Google Cloud.

What do I need to do

  1. Review the operating system lifecycle and support policy.
  2. If you need to create VMs that use these RHEL 6 images after the end of maintenance date, make copies of the images that are available in your projects.
  3. Plan and migrate your workloads and applications to RHEL 8.

Additional information

Google is working with Red Hat to make a paid add-on available for customers who plan to stay on RHEL 6. The licensing model for the RHEL 6 ELS add-on will be as follows:

  • $0.02 USD/hour for instances with 4 or fewer vCPUs
  • $0.05 USD/hour for instances with more than 4 vCPUs

If you purchase and append the add-on license to your VM, you will be charged for both the RHEL 6 OS license and the RHEL 6 ELS add-on license for the VM.

If you are interested in the RHEL 6 ELS add-on, contact your account manager.

What's next