Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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Red Hat Enterprise Linux (often abbreviated to RHEL) is a Linux distribution produced by Red Hat and targeted toward the commercial market, including mainframes. Red Hat undertakes to support each release of RHEL for 7 years after it first appears. All of Red Hat's official support, and all of Red Hat's training and certification for hardware and software deployment — Red Hat Certified Technician (RHCT), Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE), Red Hat Certified Security Specialist (RHCSS) and Red Hat Certified Architect (RHCA) — center on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform.

New releases of RHEL come out every 18 months. As customers only pay for support, when Red Hat releases a new version of RHEL during the support period, customers may upgrade to it for no additional charge.

Red Hat's first Enterprise offering (Red Hat Linux 6.2E) essentially consisted of a version of Red Hat Linux 6.2 with different support levels, and without separate engineering.

The first version of RHEL to bear the name originally came onto the market as "Red Hat Linux Advanced Server". In 2003 Red Hat rebranded Red Hat Linux Advanced Server to "Red Hat Enterprise Linux" (RHEL) AS, and added two more variants, RHEL ES and RHEL WS.

As of 2005 Red Hat distributed four variants of RHEL:

RHEL AS (advanced server) – for larger computer systems
RHEL ES (edge server or entry-level server) – for medium systems
RHEL WS (workstation) – for personal power-user desktops
Red Hat Desktop – for client-oriented single-user use

There are also "Academic" versions of the Desktop and Server edtions. They are offered to schools and students and are less expensive, but are provided without Red Hat technical support.

People sometimes mistakenly refer to ES as "Enterprise Server", in contrast to AS (Advanced Server). Two possible causes exist for this confusion:

Novell have a server distribution called SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)
Nothing on the Red Hat site or in the Red Hat marketing collateral explains what "ES" (or "AS" or "WS") stands for, even though the user community has developed (mostly) widely accepted meanings for the abbreviations.

Originally, Red Hat based RHEL on Red Hat Linux, but using a much more conservative release cycle. Later versions leveraged technologies from Fedora Core. Roughly every third version of Red Hat Linux (RHL) or Fedora Core (FC) forms the basis for a version of RHEL, thus: