Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription guide

Table of contents

• Introduction
• What you get when you purchase a subscription
• Support for the production environment
• Glossary
• Subscription packaging model 
• Assembling your subscription order
  • Sample worksheet 1: Provisioning physical layers
  • Sample worksheet 2: Adding guests to a virtual environment
  • Sample worksheet 3: Setting up a virtual environment
• Subscription scenarios and recommendations
  • Physical production environment
    • Sample worksheet 4: Setting up a physical, critical production environment
  • Virtual production environment
    • Sample worksheet 5: Calculating subscriptions for guests
    • Sample worksheet 6: Calculating subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on virtual environment
  • Open hybrid cloud
    • Sample worksheet 7: Calculating subscriptions for a private cloud
    • Sample worksheet 8: Calculating subscriptions for a public cloud
  • High-performance computing (HPC)
  • HPC use case
  • Disaster recovery
  • Development environment
  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation
• Managing subscriptions
• Renewing subscriptions
• Subscription terms
  • System coverage
  • Support services levels
  • Proper use of subscriptions and services
• Next steps
  • Registering on the Red Hat Customer Portal
  • Activating subscriptions
  • Attaching subscriptions
  • Downloading software
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux products

Introduction 

Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® powers the applications that run your organization with the control, confidence, and freedom 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 (CEE) 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.

What you get when you purchase a subscription

Your investment in Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions delivers these 10 key benefits.

Access to:

1. Access to enterprise software. A subscription provides access to the latest enterprise-ready Linux innovation built from a controlled 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. This means as new versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are released, organizations can immediately make use of that software without an additional license. 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 access to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in multiple public cloud environments. Adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux ensures that you have a platform that is engineered and certified to work with the rest of Red Hat’s portfolio.
2. Emerging open sourcetechnologies. Because Red Hat is a trusted adviser and leading contributor to open source communities, we have the insight to identify emerging technologies and the resources to evolve them into enterprise-ready solutions to meet our customers’ current and future IT needs. 
3. Integrated analytics with remediation, management, and automation. To ensure that your Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment is operating optimally, your subscription includes access to Red Hat Insights. Insights is a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offering that analyzes your environment, including the underlying server as well as applications such as SAP and MSSQL, and helps IT teams proactively identify and remediate security threats, performance bottlenecks, and misconfigurations that could affect security, compliance, availability, and stability. Your subscription supports subscription Add-Ons such as Red Hat Smart Management and Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform.
4. Life-cycle support and flexibility. Red Hat provides a variety of life-cycle options that allow organizations to continue receiving improvements and security fixes, without being forced into a costly and risky upgrade process. All Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions provide 10 years of support for each major release. Additional subscription offerings entitle you to stay on a particular minor release for a period of time, providing them more flexibility in their upgrade planning.
5. Support and expertise. In addition to phone and online incident support, your subscription gives you access to an award-winning, knowledge-centered support system that includes access to reference architectures, documentation, videos, and collaborative discussions with Red Hat experts. Above and beyond support and sharing best practices, the Red Hat Customer Portal delivers information about ongoing security vulnerabilities and the critical steps your team can take to mitigate their impact. Also, through Red Hat Insights, you can receive alerts and coaching on your system configuration and performance, based on Red Hat’s own data about what makes an organization successful. Finally, Red Hat Services has Red Hat-certified talent that is available to accelerate your work and reduce time to value. These services can only be used in the context of a paid subscription.
6. Security resources. A subscription funds 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 to all versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in their supported life cycles. Among the many deliverables of these engineers are kpatch and a Red Hat specific common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) database. With kpatch, you can patch your running Linux kernel without rebooting. This lets systems administrators apply critical security patches to the kernel immediately without having to wait for long-running tasks to complete, users to log off, or scheduled service-level agreement (SLA) windows. It gives more control over uptime without sacrificing security or stability. The definitive CVE database is maintained by the Mitre Corporation, an element of the United States Government, and is intended to be inclusive of all products and projects where a given vulnerability exists. Red Hat’s CVE database links to the definitive version but provides additional information on criticality and risk in the Red Hatspecific implementation of the software, explaining what we have done to address the issue and providing detailed guidance on what you should do to protect their environments from the threat. Additionally, Red Hat security engineers are responsible for ensuring that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other offerings are certified and comply with key government and commercial security standards.

Advocacy for: 

1. 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 ensures that you can see the entire product process, from upstream through a three-year product roadmap. This makes it easier for your business to plan your own life cycle. Additionally, the subscription provides operational transparency with visibility and predictability in our Fedora and CentOS Stream roadmaps. 
2. Community leadership in open source projects. Red Hat advocates for customer and partner needs through leadership and major contributions to the open source community. 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 enabling these communities to create, test, and integrate technologies in a community-led governance model that ensures we get feedback from everyone, not just Red Hat. And finally, we have created projects like CentOS Stream to keep community-powered contributions coming to the product during its active life cycle.
3. Partnership with hardware, software, and cloud providers. A subscription funds the resources needed to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux with our large certified hardware ecosystem, which provides a stable and high-performance platform for certified enterprise-software applications. The subscription also funds 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, resulting in problems that are identified and fixed before the next Red Hat Enterprise Linux release. This allows your organization to standardize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux using the architecture and hardware of your choosing. 
4. Your security needs. Red Hat is trusted by security standards groups and can be your advocate within community, government, and industry associations. Red Hat also partners with a variety of security teams from other organizations and can gain access to vulnerability information before it is public. Red Hat ensures that security problems are quickly identified and that fixes are immediately created and promptly delivered to your organization. Finally, Red Hat Enterprise Linux also offers various security capabilities such as SELinux, Linux audit subsystem, and control groups offering organizations support for practical problems within the government sector and highly regulated industries. Red Hat acts as a catalyst for these collaborations ensuring that diverse audiences connect with each other and solve common problems as a team.

Support for the production environment 

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

Red Hat provides two modes of support: development and production. This section covers production support, which is sometimes delivered in conjunction with our partners, where they will provide the first level of customer engagement. Development support is described in the “Development environment” section of this guide.

For production environments, Red Hat subscriptions have two 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. Red Hat product certification provides the confidence and assurance that your 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 how Red Hat supports me when I use third-party components.

Table 1. Service-level agreements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions

Glossary

Guest: An instance of the software running in a virtual machine, which in turn 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 two 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 two subscriptions—one 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 four 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, virtual machine, blade, node, partition, appliance, or engine, as applicable. 

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

Subscription packaging model 

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. 

Socket-pair for each physical node or two 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. This model is best for provisioning to physical hardware or as virtual instances in the cloud. If you are deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a virtual environment, your subscriptions are based on the number of virtual instance-pairs running the product. This model is best for low- and medium-density virtual environments.

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

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 subscriptions that follow the unlimited guest model 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 two sockets, which is all you need for a 2-socket server. If you have a 4-socket server, you would need two subscriptions. For an 8-socket machine, you would need four 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 you 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 your terms. Transferring virtual instance-pairs as physical socket-pairs is also possible. This allows you to migrate your infrastructure from physical to virtual seamlessly. The ability to migrate between physical and virtual deployment applies to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server and its Add-Ons.

Assembling your subscription order 

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscription model is:  

• Based on socket-pairs for each physical node or two 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, the questions assume that you have either a physical environment or a virtual environment and that it is a low-density environment—that is, you are running four or fewer guests per system. In reality, you likely will have a hybrid environment with various hypervisors and even a blend of high- and low-density environments. The section titled “Subscription scenarios and recommendations” 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 socketpair subscription. This subscription type cannot be split across different physical systems. 
   3.   For your multi-socket systems, add the total 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 do you 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 do you 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 deployment require—Standard or Premium?

These worksheets present calculations for some simple deployment scenarios.

Sample worksheet 1: Provisioning physical layers

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. For more information, see virtualization limits for Red Hat Enterprise Linux with KVM.

Subscription scenarios and recommendations

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

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 that there are four or fewer guests running concurrently on a hypervisor.

For more information about which hypervisors have been tested and certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, see which hypervisors are certified to run Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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

Sample worksheet 6: Calculating subscriptions for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on virtual environment

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. The 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 the architecture and products that make up Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud portfolio, see what is hybrid cloud.

The physical host systems in the open hybrid cloud environment and the guests are covered by subscriptions for Red Hat OpenStack Platform. These worksheets show the calculations for purchasing subscriptions for private and public clouds.

Sample worksheet 7: Calculating subscriptions for a private cloud

Sample worksheet 8: Calculating subscriptions for a public cloud

High-performance computing (HPC)

These are the necessary subscriptions for a high-performance computing (HPC) environment. Red Hat defines these as being composed of many identical non-interactive “compute” nodes, each fed jobs by a “head” node hosting a scheduler. Jobs almost always span multiple compute nodes using toolkits such as message passing interface (MPI).

HPC use case

• Head node(s): Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for HPC Head subscription.  
• Compute node(s): Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for HPC Compute subscription.  
• Login node(s): Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux Standard subscription.  
• Storage node(s): Use Red Hat Enterprise Linux Standard subscription.

Disaster recovery

Disaster recovery is an important component of production environment design. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has purchasing policies for disaster recovery systems that address the most common scenarios—hot, warm, and cold backups

Hot backups: The server is frequently turned on and ready to move into production mode immediately. This is typically what “failovers” do within a cluster.

In this case, two subscriptions are required, one for the production server and one for the hot backup server. For every server that needs hot backup, the subscription required must be of the same type in terms of SLA and configuration. The manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) of the Hot Backup Disaster recovery subscription is the same as the MSRP of the regular subscription.

Warm backups: The server is turned on periodically to receive backups of data from the production servers and updates from Red Hat Content Delivery Network. These periodic updates are performed no more frequently than every 60 days. For example, warm backups are used in mirroring, replication, and log-shipping scenarios.

In this case, two subscriptions are required. One is used for the regular production purpose, and the other reads as a Disaster Recovery subscription in the description. (The MSRP of the Warm Backup Disaster recovery subscription is 50% off the MSRP of the regular subscription).

Cold backups:

The server has software installed and configured, but it is turned off until the disaster occurs or for periodic disaster recovery procedure tests. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux, this means that you are allowed to preload the bits as a courtesy. However, Red Hat Content Delivery Network cannot be used to update the system until the disaster happens. Then, the paid subscription on the failed machine transfers to the cold backup server. 

In this case, you do not need two subscriptions. You will use only one subscription at any point in time. Red Hat will allow you to pre-provision the software bits onto the cold backup machine as a courtesy. If you are found to be running more units of Red Hat Enterprise Linux than you have subscribed for because you have found a use for these pre-provisioned servers other than this cold backup use case, you are obligated to pay Red Hat.

Development environment

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers several types of subscriptions to support development teams. Team size and required support level are the factors to consider when selecting subscriptions.

1. Size of team  

• For teams of 25 members or more, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Support Professional includes developer support with a response time of 2 business days. 
• For teams of 25 members or more, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Support Enterprise offers the highest level of developer support with a response time of 4 hours. 
• For an individual contributor or teams of fewer than 25 members, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Workstation offers the same tools and products as the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Support subscription, but it can be purchased on an individual basis.

2. Support service  

• Self-support includes access to software updates, the Red Hat Knowledgebase, and technical content on the Red Hat Customer Portal. It does not include phone or web support from Red Hat.  
• Professional support additionally includes unlimited web and phone requests during standard business hours with a response time of two business days. 
• Enterprise support also includes unlimited web and phone requests during standard business hours, but with a response time of four hours. 

All of the development subscriptions include membership in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Program, which helps developers derive maximum benefit from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Intended for end-user developers building custom applications, independent software vendors (ISVs) and value-added resellers (VARs) building portable applications, and system integrators customizing applications for customers, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Program includes developer tools, subscriptions, support, and training.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation 

Another category of Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscriptions is for workstation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation should be considered where single-user use cases are indicated. This subscription is purchased per installed system. Consider the users’ requirements when selecting subscriptions.

• Users of complex applications, especially graphics-intensive, such as are seen in digital animation, computer aided design and engineering, and geological research  
• Embedded use cases where graphics is the focus, such as medical imaging, air traffic control, operations centers (such as for networks or power operations), and flight simulators  
• A front end modeling system/interface for GPU intensive workloads can be deployed on HPC clusters or supercomputers  
• Virtualized deployments in customer private clouds that use remote access/VDI technology to enable end users to use VM-based workstations  
• A host for 1 or 4 VMs (see SKU descriptions for specifics)
• For Application developers, use Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Workstation (see above, “Development Environment” section for more info) 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation is available in Premium, Standard, and Self-Support options for x86_64 architecture. 

Table 2. Technical specifications for Workstation subscriptions

Managing subscriptions

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 Customer Portal: Systems, whether physical or virtual, can be registered and connected with the Red Hat Customer Portal either direct or via a proxy. You can obtain the latest versions of our software, query the Red Hat Knowledgebase, browse product documentation, and gain access to the latest bug fixes, security errata, and feature enhancements.  
• 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 Management 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 Content Delivery Network (CDN).  
• Red Hat Insights: 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 enable an agent and then gain the benefit of daily reports about potential issues in these areas. Red Hat Insights 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 secure, operate efficiently, and comply with legal as well as 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 Satellite is available with the purchase of Red Hat Smart Management for all managed systems.

Renewing subscriptions

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.

Subscription terms

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 five development machines and ten 2-socket production systems, you must purchase enough subscriptions to cover these machines. If they are 2-socket machines, then you must purchase 5 developer subscriptions and 10 subscriptions to cover the production systems.  
• 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 Server and related add-on subscriptions back and forth from physical to virtual to cloud deployments without having to change subscription terms, purchase additional subscriptions, or notify Red Hat. For example, if you have purchased a subscription for one socket-pair that you allocate to a physical machine, you can convert that socket-pair subscription to cover two virtual instances in a virtualized or cloud deployment. And you can then convert a two-instance subscription back into a socket-pair allocation.  
• You may not migrate non-Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server subscriptions off-site or to the cloud without obtaining written permission from Red Hat to do so. See Appendix 1 of your Red Hat Enterprise Agreement for more information.

Support services levels

• When you purchase a Red Hat subscription, you choose a level of support service. Developer support levels are Professional and Enterprise, and Production support levels are Self-support (available only in some regions and on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Entry Level, Self-support), Standard, and Premium.  
• 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 impact on 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 third party. 

Subscriptions must be used for the use case that they are intended for. For example, you may not use a Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation subscription as a production server. You also may not seek production support by using a developer subscription.

Next steps

Once you have purchased your 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 first 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 supports 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 your Red Hat account after ordering subscriptions, you will first activate your subscriptions. You must activate subscriptions that correspond to the software that your team will install. For example, if you have an activated subscription only for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server, you will not be able to download Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation. 

You 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 how to attach, manage, report on, and renew your inventory of subscriptions.

Downloading software

Members of your team who have been granted permission to download software by your organization’s administrator(s) 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. Software can be downloaded from Red Hat product downloads.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux products

Red Hat products are available on a subscription basis.