Support Policies for RHEL High Availability Clusters - Releases and Package Versions

Updated -

Contents

Overview

Applicable Environments

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the High Availability Add-On

Useful References and Guides

Introduction

This document lays out Red Hat's policies around the conditions on which its technical support will be provided for RHEL High Availability clusters - specifically in the area of releases of the product and individual packages that are installed. Users of RHEL High Availability software components should adhere to these policies in order to be eligible to receive support from Red Hat with the appropriate product support subscriptions.

These policies apply to cluster (members) nodes and remote nodes.

Policies

Supported RHEL major releases: RHEL High Availability follows the general RHEL product lifecycle and related policies.
The High Availability software running on RHEL major versions in their full support phase receive full support as defined in the that document. High Availability software running on RHEL major versions in their maintenance support phase receive support applicable to that phase as defined in that document.

  • Important:

    • For RHEL 6 and prior major versions, the RHEL product lifecycle does not include an Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) option for Add-Ons during the Extended Life Phase (ELP). This means that RHEL High Availability is only eligible for the limited support offering described for the Extended Life Phase in the above policy guide.

    • Starting with RHEL 7, Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) includes support for the Add-Ons, High Availability, and Resilient Storage as described in the Extended Life-cycle Support Add-On section of the RHEL Life Cycle page.

Supported RHEL minor releases: RHEL High Availability follows the general RHEL product lifecycle and related policies. This lifecycle defines the minor releases that are at any time eligible for updates, and the criteria, limitations, or requirements placed on those updates. RHEL High Availability offers Extended Update Support (EUS) with appropriate subscriptions, following the same guidelines policies in its Extended Update Support as with RHEL.

  • Red Hat Support may provide assistance with clusters running older releases than the currently active and supported minor release(s), but if the concern in focus is identified or suspected to be a result of behavior changed or addressed in a later minor release, Red Hat may suggest updating to such a active/supported release to address the concern. Red Hat's ability to deliver product changes or modified behavior is limited to these active minor releases according to the policies described in the above product lifecycle, so Red Hat's assistance with deployments continuing to use older minor releases may be limited to features or behaviors known to be available and stable in that release.

Support for clusters with mixed package releases / rolling updates: Red Hat only supports operation of a cluster across members running different RHEL or RHEL High Availability package releases for a limited time during rolling updates within the same RHEL major release.

  • See also: Recommendations: Applying package updates in a RHEL High Availability cluster
  • Red Hat will not provide support for - and strongly recommends against - applying updates to RHEL High Availability software while the cluster software is running on the member being updated. See the above recommendations article for details on applying updates in a cluster.
  • If unexpected or undesired behavior arises specifically or exclusively in scenarios involving mis-matched packages throughout the cluster, Red Hat's assistance may be limited to bringing the cluster to a fully-synchronized state with respect to package releases.

Support for Kernel live patching (kpatch) on RHEL High Availability or Resilient Storage Clusters: Red Hat supports applying Kernel live patches on member nodes of a RHEL High Availability or Resilient Storage Cluster. Please see the Recommended Practices for using Kernel Live Patching in RHEL High Availability or Resilient Storage Clusters article for recommended practices and supported RHEL and Kernel versions.

Major-release upgrades are not support except for use cases below: Red Hat does not provide support for upgrading members of a cluster to a new RHEL major release (e.g. RHEL 6->RHEL 7) without reconfiguration of the cluster on each node using the appropriate cluster-setup procedures for that release. Major releases include differences in High Availability components that may not result in a stable or working deployment simply by upgrading from one release to another.

No support for modified High Availability components / packages: Red Hat does not provide support for any component it ships that has been modified from its original shipped state, in any file that is not a configuration file. If a concern should arise in an environment using such a modified component, Red Hat Support may require using original stock packages in order to assist in the investigation.

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