Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® powers the applications that run your organization with the control, confidence, and freedom to innovate that come from a consistent foundation across hybrid deployments. Red Hat is a trusted partner to more than 90% of the companies in the Fortune 500, and a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription provides you direct access to, and advocacy within, the open source community and an ecosystem of thousands of cloud, software, and hardware providers.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription guide is your key to selecting the subscriptions that best meet your technical and business requirements, regardless of which version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux you are using. The guide also outlines the terms of your subscriptions and includes information on managing and renewing subscriptions.

Designed for the purchasing manager and those within the procurement function, the guide focuses on the details of aligning subscriptions to architectures rather than on the architectures themselves. It provides scenario-based worksheets that cover common development and production deployments. The guide also describes Red Hat Customer Experience and Engagement and the many ways in which customers and users can benefit from their Red Hat subscriptions, including the Customer Portal and service-level agreements (SLAs) for the support offerings.

Your investment in Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions delivers additional value that your business can benefit from.

Access to:

1. Enterprise software built on trust. A subscription provides access to the latest Linux innovation built from a controlled and trusted supply chain of open source software, including continuous delivery of patches and upgrades at no additional cost. The subscription is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, not any particular version of that product. As new versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are released, organizations can immediately use that software without an additional cost.  This allows you to upgrade on a schedule that is convenient for your organization, without a time-consuming or costly sales cycle. Your subscription also provides the flexibility to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux in major public cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is optimized to run at peak performance per each hyperscaler’s unique infrastructure. Red Hat Cloud Access is a program that simplifies this process. Adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux ensures that you have an engineered and certified platform to work with the entire Red Hat portfolio.
2. Emerging open source technologies. As a primary sponsor and leading contributor to open source communities, Red Hat has the unique insight to identify emerging technologies and develop them into reliable, security-focused solutions. This partnership empowers you for the long run, allowing Red Hat’s services to advocate for your business and guide customer enhancement requests directly back to the open source community. 
3. Intelligent management and built-in automation. To make sure your Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment is operating optimally, the subscription includes access to Red Hat Lightspeed (formerly Red Hat Insights). Its proactive, AI-powered management and advanced security capabilities analyze your environment, including the underlying server as well as applications such as SAP and Microsoft SQL Server and help IT teams proactively identify and remediate security threats, performance bottlenecks, and misconfigurations that could affect security, compliance, availability, and stability. Your subscription supports additional offerings such as Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform.
4. Operate confidently with a platform engineered to minimize risk across the hybrid cloud. Red Hat’s dedicated Product Security Incident Response Team continuously monitors, identifies, and proactively notifies you of security risks, delivering thoroughly tested patches throughout the product lifecycle. Core security deliverables include:
   1. Kernel live patching: Apply critical security patches to a running kernel immediately without rebooting, minimizing downtime and maintaining business continuity without sacrificing stability.
   2. CVE database: Features targeted guidance on Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) specific to Red Hat Enterprise Linux implementations, detailing exactly how Red Hat has addressed the issue so your security teams can focus and prioritize their efforts.
   3. Certified compliance standards: Prehardened baselines independently validated against government and regulated industry standards—such as Common Criteria and Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS)—ensuring compliance from the point of deployment.
   4. Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) readiness: Protect long-term data from quantum threats with NIST-standardized, quantum-resistant cryptographic policies. These system-wide policies are provided by default, meeting emerging regulatory compliance standards well ahead of the curve.
5. Lifecycle support and flexibility. Red Hat provides a variety of lifecycle options that allow organizations to continue receiving improvements and security fixes without being forced into a complex and costly upgrade process. All Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions provide 10 years of support for each major release. Additional subscription offerings entitle organizations to stay on a particular minor release  or last minor release of a major version for a period of time, providing them more flexibility in their upgrade planning.
6. Support and expertise. Beyond phone and web support, your subscription unlocks a holistic experience backed by 30 years of Linux expertise. Red Hat Customer Portal grants your team access to an extensive knowledge base, reference architectures, and collaborative expert discussions. This expert ecosystem acts as your trusted advisor, sharing best practices and delivering the exact information your team needs to mitigate risk. To further accelerate time-to-value, Red Hat Services offers certified consultants to help your business navigate complex transitions.
7. Proactive security resources. Red Hat has a dedicated team of engineers who monitor, identify, and proactively notify you of risks. The Red Hat security team remediates these vulnerabilities by creating, testing, and delivering security patches for all Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions during their supported lifecycles. Among the many deliverables of these engineers are:
   1. kpatch, which allows Red Hat customers to patch their running Linux kernel without rebooting. This lets sysadmins apply critical security patches to the kernel immediately without having to wait for long-running tasks to complete, users to log off, or scheduled SLA windows. It gives more control over uptime without sacrificing security or stability. 
   2. A Red Hat database of CVEs that links to the definitive version maintained by MITRE and provides additional information on criticality and risk in the Red Hat-specific implementation of the software. It explains what Red Hat has done to address the issue and provides detailed guidance on what customers should do to protect their environments from the threat. This allows Red Hat customers to focus better and prioritize their security efforts.
   3. Certification and compliance engineering for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other offerings for key government and commercial security standards.

Advocacy for: 

8. Visibility and influence over Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Because Red Hat Enterprise Linux is based on these upstream projects, your organizations can help influence the components incorporated into Red Hat Enterprise Linux and help power our roadmap. The subscription makes sure you can see the entire product process, from upstream to a three-year product roadmap. This makes it more convenient for your business to plan its own lifecycle.
9. Community leadership in open source projects. Red Hat advocates for customer and partner needs through leadership and major open source community contributions. Your subscription funds continuous support of upstream projects to advocate for your requirements so that they can be implemented as future product features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat also fosters innovation by sponsoring community projects like Fedora by helping these communities create, test, and integrate technologies in a community-led governance model that allows Red Hat to get feedback from everyone, not just Red Hat. Finally, Red Hat has created projects like CentOS Stream to keep community-powered contributions coming to the product during its active lifecycle.
10. Partnership with hardware, software, and cloud providers. A subscription funds the resources needed to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Red Hat’s large certified hardware ecosystem, which provides a stable and high-performance platform for certified enterprise-software applications. The partnerships ensure the engineering necessary for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run on and integrate with all major certified cloud providers. These partnerships translate to early, ongoing, and intensive technical collaboration with Red Hat Enterprise Linux engineering teams, ensuring that customers receive the security and performance they expect. This collaboration allows your organization to standardize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux using your choice of architecture and hardware.
11. Your organization’s security needs. Red Hat is trusted by security standards groups and can be your advocate within the community, government, and industry associations. Red Hat also partners with a variety of security teams from other organizations to develop fixes for vulnerabilities while they are still in an embargoed state (before the vulnerability is public). Red Hat works to assess security problems and their applicability to its products, issuing patches or remediations as needed. Finally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux also includes various security capabilities such as Identity Management, SELinux, Linux audit subsystem, and control groups offering organizations support for practical problems within the government sector, highly regulated industries and any customer interested in protecting their assets and reputation. Red Hat acts as a catalyst for these collaborations making sure that diverse audiences connect with each other and solve common problems as a team.

Red Hat customers benefit from a collaborative support relationship with knowledgeable RedHat domain experts. When you engage in the Red Hat support process, you and your teams will often work with the people who write and test the software and oversee the open source development of the underlying technologies. As a customer, contact us to take advantage of Red Hat’s expertise during all phases of planning, testing, deploying, maintaining, and upgrading the infrastructure. These interactions are provided as part of your organization’s subscription.

Red Hat provides 2 modes of support: development and production. This section covers production support, which is sometimes delivered in conjunction with Red Hat partners. Development support is described in this guide's Development environment section.

For production environments, Red Hat subscriptions have 2 levels of support Standard and Premium, which are distinguished by different SLAs that define initial and ongoing response times.

Red Hat also provides third-party support for enterprise hardware, software, and certified cloud providers. The Red Hat product certification provides the confidence and assurance that your organization’s third-party tools and solutions are tested and certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For a complete list of tested, certified, and supported components, see the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. For more general information about supported and unsupported components, see As a customer, how does Red Hat support me when I use third-party components.

Guest: An instance of the software running in a virtual machine that is running on a hypervisor. In the Red Hat subscription model, a guest is associated with a physical system.

Physical node: A physical system on which you install or execute all or a portion of the software, including, without limitation, a server, workstation, laptop, blade, or other physical system, as applicable.

Socket: A central processing unit (CPU) socket on a motherboard.

Socket-pair: Up to 2 sockets where each is occupied by a CPU on a system. Two servers with a single occupied socket on each must be entitled separately; therefore, you would purchase 2 subscriptions—1 for each server.

Stacking: The ability to purchase multiple subscriptions to cover a multisocket machine. For example, the base subscription unit is a socket-pair. To entitle an 8-socket machine, you would purchase 4 base subscriptions.

System: A system on which you install or execute all or a portion of the software. A system includes each instance of the software installed or executed on, without limitation, a server, workstation, laptop, VM, blade, node, partition, appliance, or engine, as applicable.

Virtual node:  An instance of the software executed, in whole or in part, on a VM or container.

Today’s complex infrastructure environments built from combinations of physical, virtual, and cloud deployments require a purchasing model that provides choice and flexibility. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscription model lets you choose the basis on which you purchase, stack subscriptions to streamline purchasing, and move subscriptions from physical to virtual to cloud and back to adapt to changing requirements. 

Note: For IBM Z and LinuxONE customers, Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not require the entire physical node to be entitled, only the cores used by Red Hat Enterprise Linux. IBM Z and LinuxONE customers know this as “subcapacity” entitlement. Customers using only a subset of the available cores on their IBM Z and LinuxONE environment for Red Hat Enterprise Linux only require subscriptions for the subset that is used for running those Red Hat Enterprise Linux instances. This applies regardless of how CPU partitioning is achieved, whether by CPU pooling, capping, separate logical partitions (LPARs), or other means.

Socket-pair for each physical node or 2 virtual nodes

As a Red Hat customer, you have the choice of deploying your Red Hat Enterprise Linux products on either a physical or virtual basis. If you are deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux on physical hardware, your subscriptions are based on the number of socket-pairs in the systems used. If you are deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a virtual environment, whether on-premise or hosted on a third-party service such as a public cloud, your subscriptions are based on the number of virtual nodes running the product. Each Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription for physical and virtual servers entitles a customer to use that subscription on a physical node with up to 2 sockets or 2 virtual nodes regardless of virtual sockets. The subscriptions that follow this model are:

• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Standard and Premium.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Add-Ons.

Self-support subscriptions

• Do not include Red Hat customer support.
• Cannot be stacked with other subscriptions.
• Are not intended for production environments.
• Are not for use with Red Hat Cloud Access.
• Entry-level server subscriptions are available only with self-support, can only be deployed on physical systems, and are not stackable.

Virtual deployment subscriptions

Red Hat also offers a subscription model that allows you to run an unlimited number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual instances and is best for high-density virtual environments. This subscription model is offered on a physical socket-pair basis.

The unlimited guest model's subscriptions are:

• Red Hat OpenStack® Platform.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Virtual Datacenters.
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux Add-Ons.

Stacking

Stacking gives you the flexibility to aggregate Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions to accommodate any size physical server. The base Red Hat Enterprise Linux model includes entitlements for 2 sockets, which is all you need for a 2-socket server. If you have a 4-socket server, you would need 2 subscriptions. For an 8-socket machine, you would need 4 subscriptions, and so forth. In this way, your subscriptions can “stack” to scale to any size system. Moreover, as your physical infrastructure changes, you can adjust your subscriptions to match your infrastructure. You can replace two 2-socket systems with a 4-socket system and vice versa without increasing the number of subscriptions.

Subscription portability

Subscription portability gives your organization another degree of flexibility. It lets you transfer a physical 2-socket subscription to a 2-virtual-instance subscription without contacting Red Hat to adjust the terms. Transferring virtual instance-pairs as physical socket-pairs is also possible. This allows you to migrate your infrastructure from physical to virtual continually. The ability to migrate subscriptions back and forth applies to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server and its Add-Ons across physical, virtual, and cloud deployments without changing your organization’s terms or requiring notification.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscription model is:

• Based on socket-pairs for each physical node or 2 virtual nodes.
• Usable in physical, virtual, or cloud deployments.
• Stackable.
• Available with Standard or Premium support.

There are basic questions to answer when determining the number and type of subscriptions you need. For simplicity’s sake, the questions assume that you have either a physical environment or a virtual environment and that it is a low-density environment—meaning, you are running four or fewer guests per system. In reality, you will likely have a hybrid environment with various hypervisors and a blend of high- and low-density environments. The “Subscription scenarios and recommendations” section will walk you through several examples of blended and open hybrid cloud deployments.

1. Are you purchasing subscriptions for a physical or a virtual environment? If the answer is a physical environment, go to step 2. If your answer is a virtual environment, go to step 3.
2. Typical physical server configurations are 1-, 2-, 4-, and 8-socket systems.
   1. How many systems do you have of each kind of socket configuration?
   2. Count the number of 1-socket systems you have. Each of these must be entitled with a socket-pair subscription. This subscription type cannot be split across different physical systems.
   3. For your multisocket systems, total the number of sockets and divide by 2. Add the result to the number of 1-socket systems. This total is the number of subscriptions you will purchase to entitle your physical servers.
   4. Proceed to step 4.

3. How many virtual servers does your organization have?

   1. Divide the number of virtual instances by 2. This is the number of subscriptions you will purchase for the guests in your virtual environment. 
   2. Proceed to step 4.

4. Which Add-Ons does your team want to include? Add-Ons follow the same socket-pair subscription model, and like the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions, can be migrated between physical and virtual systems. 

5. Which support service level does your organization’s deployment require—Standard or Premium?

These worksheets present calculations for some simple deployment scenarios.

Sample worksheet 2: Adding guests to a virtual environment

Sample worksheet 3: Setting up a virtual environment

These solutions are aimed at use cases for dense virtualization and are more cost-effective overall for those types of deployments. See the “Subscription scenarios and recommendations” section for information on more complex virtual environments.

The subscription scenarios in this section expand on the previous worksheets by adding elements found in actual deployments like the high-availability ones.

Physical production environment

A physical production environment often has servers with 1, 2, 4, 8, or more sockets and typically includes Red Hat Add-Ons that enhance availability, performance, or scalability. Figure 1 shows how many Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscriptions are needed to cover a critical production environment.

Number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscriptions in a critical production environment

This worksheet details the subscription allocations shown in Figure 1. Note that there are no 1-socket systems in this example.

Sample worksheet 4: Setting up a physical, critical production environment

Virtual production environment

A virtual environment includes virtual guests in addition to physical servers that host the hypervisors. The configuration shown in Figure 2 assumes that the hypervisor is Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization and that the guests are all Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This configuration is a low-density production environment, meaning there are 4 or fewer guests running concurrently on a hypervisor.

Note: Red Hat will support numerous virtual CPUs in virtualized guests of any supported operating system (OS) running in the KVM hypervisor on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server. For a list of virtualization limits for Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM, review the following - Virtualization limits for Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM. For more robust management, including network segmentation, load balancing, and persistence, consider Red Hat OpenShift® Virtualization or Red Hat OpenStack Platform, which provides a supported hypervisor and management tools for large-scale virtualization.

For more information about which hypervisors have been tested and certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware and Nutanix, see—Which hypervisors are certified to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscriptions in a virtual, critical production environment

Figure 2 is the same as Figure 1 except for the added virtual guests. The assumption is that every node in this cluster must run as highly available in a critical environment. The virtualized production environment would have the same High Availability Add-Ons as a physical production environment. This worksheet shows the calculations for added guests.

Sample worksheet 5: Calculating subscriptions for guests

The scenario in Figure 3 assumes that the virtual environment is a 100% Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment. Figure 3 shows an environment where the hypervisors are VMware, and the guests are Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

This worksheet shows the calculations for the subscriptions required to cover the deployment in Figure 3.

Open hybrid cloud

Red Hat defines an open hybrid cloud environment as one that includes a combination of physical, virtual, and private or public cloud deployments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux portfolio has subscriptions that serve all of these environments. The following example builds on the previous ones. The physical and virtual environments depicted in Figure 4 are the same with the addition of private and public cloud components.

For more information on Red Hat architecture and products that make up our open hybrid cloud portfolio, see What is hybrid cloud?

Number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscriptions in a hybrid cloud environment

To manage your Red Hat subscriptions and take full advantage of the services and tools offered, your systems must be registered using Red Hat Subscription Management or its command-line interface, included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat offers services and tools to help you manage your Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions, which include:

• Red Hat Subscription Management. A customer-driven, end-to-end solution that provides tools for subscription status and management with Red Hat’s system management tools. When you purchase a subscription to a product, Red Hat Subscription (RHSM) tracks which system(s) in your inventory are registered to the subscription. Registered systems are entitled to support services, as well as errata, patches, and upgrades from the Red Hat CDN. Red Hat Subscription Management is accessed from the Red Hat Customer Portal.
• Red Hat Lightspeed. provides a key management service as part of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription. It proactively analyzes the environment; identifies potential security, performance, availability, and stability risks; and includes remediation guidance. System administrators simply provide agent support and then gain the benefit of daily reports about potential issues in these areas. Red Hat Lightspeed provides system administrators with the information they need to help minimize downtime and other issues.
• Red Hat Satellite. Red Hat Satellite provides patch management, provisioning, configuration management, and capabilities to make Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems more security-focused, operate more efficiently, and compliant with legal and organizational standards. Satellite also helps you manage your subscription inventory by providing fine-grained reporting on allocated and available subscriptions and their expiration dates.

Red Hat subscriptions are valid for a duration specified in the contract your organization signs with Red Hat. Renewing on schedule is the only way to continue receiving the full benefit of your Red Hat subscriptions, including technical support, security patches, product upgrades, and full participation in an ecosystem of partners and experts.

Your account team will always be available to you and will be in touch over the duration of your subscription. At 90, 60, and 30 days prior to a subscription expiration, the person designated in the contract will receive email reminders from Red Hat. These reminders include instructions for renewing subscriptions. The method of renewal depends on how the subscriptions were purchased. If you believe your organization is not receiving emails or that the emails might be going to the wrong individual, contact Red Hat Customer Service at 1-888-REDHAT-1.

This section summarizes some of the terms and conditions pertaining to Red Hat subscriptions described in Appendix 1 of the Red Hat Enterprise Agreement. Appendix 1 is the binding document, and nothing written in this guide supersedes the terms made in Appendix 1. See the current localized version: Red Hat Enterprise Agreements and Product Appendices. If you have any questions, contact your Red Hat account team.

System coverage

• Our agreement states that you must purchase subscriptions for every system and virtual instance in your organization where Red Hat Enterprise Linux is installed. For example, if you have Red Hat Enterprise Linux installed on 5 development machines and ten 2-socket production systems, you must purchase enough subscriptions to cover these machines, regardless of the version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux installed. If they are 2-socket machines, then you must purchase 5 subscriptions and 10 subscriptions to cover the production systems. Your subscription entitles you to upgrade to the latest version at your convenience.
• You may migrate a subscription from one system to another system with similar  characteristics without purchasing additional subscriptions as long as the total number of subscriptions still matches the total number of installed systems.
• You may migrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Server and related Add-on subscriptions back and forth from physical to virtual to cloud deployments without changing subscription terms, purchasing additional subscriptions, or notifying Red Hat. For example, if your organization purchased a subscription for 1 socket-pair that you allocate to a physical machine, you can convert that socket-pair subscription to cover 2 virtual instances in a virtualized or cloud deployment. And you can then convert a 2-instance subscription back into a socket-pair allocation.
• You may not migrate unaffiliated Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Server subscriptions off-site or to a cloud environment without obtaining permission from Red Hat. See Appendix 1 of your Red Hat Enterprise Agreement for more information.

Support services levels

• When you purchase a Red Hat subscription, you will be required to choose a level of support service. Developer support levels are Professional and Enterprise, and Production support levels are Self-support, Standard, and Premium. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Entry Level and Self-support are only available in some regions.
• Production support provides assistance with installation, application testing, usage, problem diagnosis, and bug fixes for software used for production purposes. It does not include assistance with code development, system design, network design, architectural design, optimizations, tuning recommendations, development or implementation of security rules or policies, third-party software made available with Red Hat software, supplementary channels, and preview technologies.
• You may purchase subscriptions at different support levels. For example, you might purchase subscriptions for business-impacting workloads with Premium support services and for less critical workloads with Standard support services. When making decisions on support levels, it is important to understand the impact of a system or systems being unavailable. For instance, a development server being unavailable may not affect customers immediately, but it may still have a significant effect on the business when the costs of idled developers and product delays are considered. You cannot use your higher-level support services to obtain support for systems to which you have allocated lower-level support services. For example, you may not call for support for a system with Standard support and request Premium support based on a different subscription.
• Add-ons inherit the underlying SLA for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription to which they are attached. For example, if the High Availability Add-on is attached to a Premium SLA subscription of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, it inherits the Premium SLA for High Availability.
• Developer support provides assistance with installation, usage, problem diagnosis, and bug fixes. It also includes advice on architecture, design,  development, and prototyping of applications. It does not include assistance with software made available through supplementary channels and preview technologies. 

Proper use of subscriptions and services

• Evaluation versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions may not be used beyond their term or for any purpose not explicitly defined in the evaluation terms and conditions.
• Subscriptions to software and support services are for internal use only. (“Internal” includes affiliates.) Subscriptions cannot be transferred to a 3rd party.
• Subscriptions must be used for the use case that they are intended for. For example, your organization may not use a Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations subscription as a production server. You also may not seek production support by using a developer subscription.

Once your organization purchases its Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions, your next steps will be to:

1. Register on the Red Hat Customer Portal.
2. Activate your subscriptions.
3. Attach your subscriptions.
4. Download your software.

Registering on the Red Hat Customer Portal

The 1st step in obtaining the complete value of your Red Hat subscriptions is to register on the Red Hat Customer Portal. Every member of your IT organization can be registered—there are no limitations on the number of registrants per account.

The Customer Portal is the gateway to your subscription management services and tools. There, you can activate, entitle, renew, manage, and report on your subscriptions. In addition to these services and tools, the Customer Portal has a knowledgebase and an extensive library of information resources that support users ranging from novices to experts.

Activating subscriptions

If you created a Red Hat account before ordering your subscriptions, you can skip this step. Your software will have been delivered to your account and you can begin the entitlement process.

If you create a Red Hat account after ordering your subscriptions, you will need to first activate your subscriptions. You must activate subscriptions corresponding to the software your team will install.

You can activate subscriptions in the Customer Portal by using tools available from the Subscription tab. From the subscription activation tool, you will enter the product activation codes (also referred to as subscription numbers) that you received in an email from Red Hat. Then, you can begin downloading software.

Attaching subscriptions

The final step is to register systems and attach subscriptions. The process for attaching subscriptions to systems varies depending on the Red Hat subscription management service or tool that you are using. See the appropriate Red Hat product documentation for instructions on attaching, managing, reporting on, and renewing your inventory of subscriptions.

Downloading software

Members of your team who have been granted permission to download software (by your organization’s administrator) can begin downloading and installing software. By default, the administrator is the person who first created your Red Hat account. An administrator can then designate multiple administrators for the account. The software can be downloaded from Red Hat product downloads.