Announcing full support for new Red Hat Enterprise Linux image builder service

Red Hat is pleased to announce that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) image builder service is now fully supported with your RHEL subscription.

The RHEL image builder service, which can be found in the left navigation of the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console, simplifies and streamlines the process of assembling your own customized RHEL operating system images with the latest content and security updates for all of your hybrid cloud environments.

The traditional method of installing operating systems from DVDs does not match today’s realities in hybrid cloud environments. The many tools and configurations required for physical, cloud and edge deployments present a significant burden of technical knowledge for end users.

RHEL image builder helps remove the guesswork and provides a streamlined experience so that your RHEL system images can be built in a more consistent and supportable way, tailored to your environments. No more guessing about which cloud or virtual guest agents need to be installed. Simply define your very own “gold” template package to build images for each deployment environment.

What’s included

The initial beta release of the RHEL image builder service provided the ability to create RHEL server images for Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform, as well as generic virtual guest images suitable for Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat Virtualization and basic RHEL KVM virtualization.  Additionally, it allowed for customized package selection, enabling users to define a template image that better suits their workload requirements.

New functionality added since the beta includes:

• Downloadable images for

  • VMware vSphere

  • Installer image for physical servers

• Customizable filesystem mount points

• Easy auto-registration options to access the latest RHEL bug and security fixes

• Auto-lookup of activation keys associated with the user’s account

• Support for image creation for RHEL 8 and 9 

Users can further customize images by selecting additional RHEL content to be included in the build.  Once your  image is created, you can either download it or copy it to your cloud account storage to incorporate into your deployment workflows. 

Give it a try

To get started with the RHEL image builder service, simply log into the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console using your Red Hat account — or register for a free account — and click on “Image Builder” in the left navigation. The process is designed to be intuitive, and documentation is provided throughout.

Note:  If you are new to Red Hat or do not have a RHEL subscription, we have multiple no-cost options available:

• This blog post  will guide you through the process of creating an account to get access

• A 60-day trial of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

• Speak with a Red Hat sales representative about the Developer for Teams subscription

Tell us what you think

You can share your thoughts and suggestions directly with the image builder product team by using the Feedback tab pinned to the right side of the dashboard. Your feedback is valuable, and will help guide and prioritize future image builder updates.

In addition to this new service, which requires no setup or infrastructure, RHEL image builder is also available for installation in your on-premises RHEL environment if you prefer not to use a hosted service.  Plus, this helpful tutorial on the Red Hat Blog explains how to use both the on-premise and hosted service versions of image builder to configure your Azure account to share/upload custom image builder images.   

Keep watching for additional new features and tutorial blog posts coming soon!