Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 (RHEL 9) is now the preferred Linux-based operating system for new deployments, supported by the Hosted Platforms Team (HEAT). While RHEL 9 will be supported by Red Hat through May 31, 2032, the university end of life will be May 31, 2030. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (RHEL 7) reached end of life on June 30, 2024; Hosting Services purchased extended lifecycle support, making the official University end-of-life June 30, 2026. Despite this extended support, significantly more vulnerabilities exist on these systems due to outdated applications and frameworks.

In order to comply with University Information Security policies, IT administrators must migrate their applications and workloads from existing RHEL 7 virtual machines (VMs). Migration of applications is the responsibility of the IT administrators who manage those applications, and HEAT is unable to provide application-level support. 

The only supported mechanism to migrate applications is by requesting a new RHEL 9 VM and redeploying the application on the new host. HEAT recommends using AWX (commonly referred to as Ansible Tower) to run Ansible playbooks against their new hosts in order to deploy applications and configurations. All RHEL 7 and 9 hosts are automatically available within AWX, and units may submit a request to the Developer Experience Team (DevEx) to request onboarding and access to AWX.

  • Chef will not manage RHEL 9 hosts (as of 9/11/2025 Chef is no longer managing any OIT-hosted systems)
  • All VMs are offered as Platforms-as-a-Service (PaaS); no option exists for fully-managed VMs
  • Red Hat SSSD now provides authentication against Active Directory; VAS (now Quest Authentication Services) no longer provides this service
  • SELinux runs in Enforcing mode by default; please see HEAT’s Hosting Manual page for tips and tricks on administering systems with SELinux
  • Administrators have full sudo privileges including root access
  • FirewallD replaces IPTables for the system firewall and a baseline firewall rule set ships with new systems; administrators are responsible for configuring rules to allow reasonable access to their applications
  • The package manager in RHEL 9 is dnf; yum is an alias to dnf by default and dnf functions nearly identically
  • A list of package repositories accessible by RHEL 9 hosts is available in HEAT’s Hosting Manual
  • Zabbix 6 monitors RHEL 9 hosts; a baseline security configuration is monitored and redeployed if basic security features are disabled
  • Three network configurations exist for RHEL 9
    • Load-balanced: VMs with load-balanced network configuration reside on a network with public access routed through an F5 load balancer to allow for high availability applications on request
    • Public: VMs with public network configuration receive a publicly routable IP address and may have services published on request
    • Private: VMs with private network configuration are only accessible from UMN internal networks

Need Migration Assistance?

If you would like assistance with your RHEL7 to RHEL9 migration, please reach out to the Linux Virtual Team by filling out their request form. Once they receive your request, one of their team members will reach out to discuss opportunities with you.