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RHEL 8 Resources

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RHEL 8

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8

Updated 28/May/2020 – Added the Spacewalk 2.9 and 2.10 client repositories!

Updated 18/May/2020 – Added the Centos 8 and EPEL links!

Red Hat announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8) at Red Hat Summit on 7 May 2019.

The following page attempts to bookmark RHEL 8 resources that might be useful for sysadmins that are looking forward to deploying this release.

Already running a Linux distribution on your desktop and want to try RHEL 8 or Centos 8? Take a look at RHEL 8 KVM QCOW quick-start.

Official Documentation

Supporting Blog Posts

May 2029

RHEL 8 will be supported for 10 years. That’s right, the same Operating System you install today will continue to receive updates until May 2029! Deploy today and know you will be covered for the future.

6 Month Update Cycle

Minor releases are planned for release every six months, rather than the somewhat ad-hoc 6-9 month releases we have experienced in the past. This should be a good thing and help with planning. Red Hat is simplifying the RHEL product phases from four to three: Full Support, Maintenance Support, and Extended Life Phase. For additional details, see:

About RHEL 8

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (Ootpa) is based on Fedora 28, upstream Linux kernel 4.18, systemd 239, and GNOME 3.28

Satellite 6 Support

RHEL 8 clients should be able to communicate with the upcoming Satellite 6.5 release. Packages should be there in the 6.5 Tools repo.

Spacewalk Support

Although you cannot run Spacewalk on RHEL8, Spacewalk 2.9 supports RHEL 8 clients. From the Spacewalk 29 release notes:

Spacewalk server is now capable of syncing and distributing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 Beta content.

https://github.com/spacewalkproject/spacewalk/wiki/ReleaseNotes29

However, note the following caveat which was posted on Reddit:

you should be to manage RHEL 8 systems pretty well, only issue I see is that in case you’re using modularity feature, spacewalk might be suggesting you incorrect updates (as the modularity logic is not implemented there).

https://www.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/blv8au/is_spacewalk_able_to_manage_rhel_8_systems/

Client downloads for Spacewalk 2.10 are available at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/g/spacewalkproject/spacewalk-2.10-client/
Client downloads for Spacewalk 2.9 are available at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/g/spacewalkproject/spacewalk-2.9-client/

Installation

If you have been using the old “ip= netmask= gateway=” options with Anaconda which worked successfully in RHEL 5, 6 and 7 you’ll find these options no longer work in RHEL 8. See Why does Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.0 anaconda no longer accept traditional “ip=IP netmask=NM gateway=GW” values on command line? for further details.

Ansible

At first glance, it looks as though there is a problem with the repository that has been configured on RHEL 8 installations. Note the package count of zero in the ansible-2.8-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms repository.

[root@unixsysadmin #] yum repolist
Updating Subscription Management repositories.
Last metadata expiration check: 1:01:28 ago on Sat 11 May 2019 09:11:43 AM BST.
repo id repo name status
ansible-2.8-for-rhel-8-x86_64-rpms Red Hat Ansible Engine 2.8 for RHEL 8 x86_64 (RPMs)          0
rhel-8-for-x86_64-appstream-rpms   Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86_64 - AppStream (RPMs) 4,903
rhel-8-for-x86_64-baseos-rpms      Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 for x86_64 - BaseOS (RPMs)    1,939

You may recall that in RHEL 7, Ansible was available in the Extras Channel, but then deprecated (Ansible deprecated in the Extras channel).

For RHEL 8, you will need an Ansible Engine subscription. Note that the repository for Ansible 2.8 is setup as of the RHEL GA release date, but 2.8 is due to be released on 16 May. See https://github.com/ansible/ansible/commits/devel/docs/docsite/rst/roadmap/ROADMAP_2_8.rst and https://www.reddit.com/r/redhat/comments/bmmkhn/rhel8_where_is_ansible/
Alternatives to this include waiting for community releases of Ansible to appear in EPEL 8 (see later in this post) or run pip3 install ansible if you can’t wait for an RPM release.

Puppet

Packages for Puppet can be found at https://yum.puppetlabs.com/puppet/el/8/x86_64/

EPEL 8

EPEL 8 (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux) is now available. If you decide to use it, you’ll also need to enable the codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-*-rpms repository. This is a requirement because some EPEL packages may have dependencies on that repo.

dnf install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-8.noarch.rpm
subscription-manager repos --enable "codeready-builder-for-rhel-8-`/bin/arch`-rpms"

For additional information, see EPEL – Fedora Project Wiki

Universal Base Image

Moving to containers is seen as a big step forward in security. However, the supply chain around the container becomes very important. Rather than one O/S running on your server, you’ll now have many containers running from potentially many different sources. How can you ensure your base image comes from a reputable source? Historically, users have used Apline Linux, Fedora, Ubuntu or Centos as a base as they were readily available. Now however, all users (a Red Hat customer or not) can take a base image from Red Hat: Introducing the Red Hat Universal Base Image

The Red Hat Universal Base Image is available to all developers with or without a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, providing a more secure and reliable foundation for building enterprise-ready containerized applications. Applications built with the Universal Base Image can be run anywhere and will experience the benefits of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux life cycle and support from Red Hat when run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.

https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-enterprise-linux-8-every-enterprise-every-cloud-every-workload

What about licenses and subscriptions with the UBI? Check out Red Hat Universal Base Image and Licensing.

There are three images available – ubi (208 MB), ubi-minimal (90 MB) and ubi-init (223 MB)

The following graphic gives a good comparison of the UBI versions: https://www.redhat.com/cms/managed-files/styles/wysiwyg_full_width/s3/blog%204.png?itok=7ED4YTCp

It’s easy to get started:

For UBI 8:
podman pull registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi
podman pull registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi-minimal
podman pull registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi-init

For UBI 7:
podman pull registry.access.redhat.com/ubi7/ubi
podman pull registry.access.redhat.com/ubi7/ubi-minimal
podman pull registry.access.redhat.com/ubi7/ubi-init

https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introducing-red-hat-universal-base-image

Live Upgrade Limitations

Virt-Manager

Although still supported in RHEL 8, virt-manager has been deprecated. The RHEL 8 web console is intended to become its replacement in a subsequent release. It is, therefore, recommended that you get familiar with the web console for managing virtualization in a GUI. However, in RHEL 8, some features may only be accessible from either virt-manager or the command line.

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-us/red_hat_enterprise_linux/8/html-single/configuring_and_managing_virtualization/index

Release Dates

Release dates for all RHEL releases can be found at Red Hat Enterprise Linux Release Dates.

Modularity / Application Streams

RHEL 8 – Modules and Application Stream Overview

Network Scripts

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 (RHEL 8) has deprecated the network scripts that have been used in previous RHEL releases. RHEL 8 now comes with new versions of the ifup and ifdown commands which call the nmcli tool. See RHEL 8 Configure IP Address.

DNF / YUM

yum is a symlink to dnf – in general you can run ‘yum’ commands as you’ve done in the past or switch the new ‘dnf’ command and provide the same arguments to ‘dnf’ as you are used to with ‘yum’. Eg: ‘dnf update’, ‘dnf repolist’.

Composer

Composer is a new way of creating RHEL 8 images and is based on the open source weldr project. These images may be ‘gold’ images which your organisation may use to roll out RHEL to the enterprise or custom images for specific applications. The images that are created by the tool can be bootable ISO images, Amazon Machine Images (AMI), VMware Virtual Machine Disk Images (vmdk) and others. For full documentation, see Composing a customized RHEL system image.

Centos 8

Centos 8.0.1905 was released on 24 September 2019 as was based on RHEL 8. For full details of what was involved in building the distribution, see https://wiki.centos.org/About/Building_8

VMware

You can view the products for which RHEL 8 is certified on VMware at the following URL: VMware Compatibility Guide

See also:

Remi Repository

Third party repository provider Remi has made a RHEL 8 repository available.

Dell

According to https://www.dell.com/community/Systems-Management-General/RHEL-8-support/td-p/7300982 “RHEL8 support is with September release of OpenManage Server Administrator(OMSA)”.

HPE

Veritas

The following links show that support for RHEL8 has already begun with SFHA 7.4.1:

News Articles

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