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Move from CentOS Linux®, Oracle Linux, Alma Linux, or Rocky Linux to Red Hat® Enterprise Linux with the convert2RHEL tool.
Evaluate your CentOS Linux migration options with a 6-question assessment to give immediate, personalized guidance for a smooth transition to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
What is convert2RHEL?
Convert2RHEL is a command line utility that analyzes your system’s readiness and converts RPM-based Linux operating systems (OS) to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It’s an automated way to standardize on Red Hat Enterprise Linux instead of manually redeploying all your workloads.
Convert2RHEL minimizes the need for costly redeployment projects and reduces administrative burden by maintaining existing OS customizations, configurations, and preferences during the conversion.
Why convert2RHEL?
The CentOS Project will discontinue updates and releases of CentOS Linux® 7 on June 30, 2024. This means current CentOS Linux users will need to choose a migration path to continue receiving security patches and updates.
How to use convert2RHEL
Identify a conversion path
Many users migrating from CentOS Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux will convert to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 first. After your systems have migrated to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, users can either upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (which can be done in-place), or explore our Extended Life-cycle Support (ELS) subscription. Check out the cheat sheet for using Convert2RHEL to learn more.
Supported conversion paths include:
- CentOS Linux 8 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
- Oracle Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7
- Oracle Linux 8 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
- Alma Linux 8 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
- Rocky Linux 8 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8
Conversions from CentOS Linux 6 and Oracle Linux 6 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux are unsupported—since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is outside the lifecycle maintenance phase—but guidance is provided in this documentation.
Prepare to convert
Read this documentation for guidance, additional features, and information on known limitations. Verify that your system is supported for conversion to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and then back it up. Use the documentation—which includes step-by-step instructions on how to assess system applications and data—to identify potential complications with workloads, configurations, or applications, and proactively remediate issues. Identify compatibility issues and layered applications prior to your migration in order to minimize risk and optimize the system.
If challenges or complexities arise during this phase, reach out to Red Hat Consulting. These experts can help convert more complex applications and workloads, as well as help standardize processes, analyze workloads, and automate migration variants, all of which can help minimize risks associated with OS conversion.
Review the pre-conversion analysis report
To assess whether your systems can be converted to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, run the pre-conversion analysis. This generates a report that summarizes potential problems and suggests recommended solutions. The report also helps you decide whether it is possible or advisable to proceed with the conversion to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Convert
After backing up your existing OS, run the convert2RHEL utility while following along with the documentation. Convert2RHEL will automatically identify and replace OS packages from your original Linux distribution with Red Hat Enterprise Linux equivalents, and convert2RHEL is officially supported to help troubleshoot conversion variants.
Once the conversion is successful, reboot the system into Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It may be necessary to reinstall third-party RPMs or reconfigure system services after conversion.
Upgrade
If your system is running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 after convert2RHEL has finished, take a moment to assess your support situation. If you took advantage of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Third Party Linux Migration offer or purchased an Extended Life-cycle Support (ELS) add-on subscription, then you have additional time to upgrade to a newer version. If you do not have either of these extended support options, we recommend upgrading to a newer, supported version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux before version 7 reaches end of maintenance on June 30, 2024.
Another tool that helps users expand their capabilities is Red Hat Developer Subscription for Teams. It allows existing Red Hat customer organizations, who are running Red Hat technologies in their production environments, the opportunity to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux at no extra cost. Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives developers easy access to a more reliable and security-focused operating system, allowing your organization to build and test applications on the same innovative and reliable platform used for your production workloads.
Get back to work
Once the conversion and upgrade are complete, you have access to all the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux updates—as well as all the performance, support, management, and security capabilities that Red Hat Enterprise Linux includes.
For more detailed notes about the conversion process, visit the technical documentation and Red Hat Knowledgebase.
