Red Hat Enterprise Linux (often abbreviated to RHEL) is a Linux distribution created by Red Hat and targeted toward the business market. A release of RHEL is supported for 7 years from release, and all of Red Hat s official support, hardware, software, and RHCT RHCE and RHCA training is based around Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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

There are four flavors of RHEL: Red Hat Desktop, WS (workstation), ES (edge server, or a departmental- and entry-level server), AS (advanced server).

Originally, RHEL was based on Red Hat Linux, but with a much more conservative release cycle. Now it s based off proven technologies from Fedora Core.

CentOS, Scientific Linux and White Box Enterprise Linux are RedHat Enterprise Linux clones which aim to be compatible with RHEL.

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