Extended Support Considerations

Support changes for Red Hat Enterprise Linux v7 with CipherTrust Transparent Encryption

In May, 2022, Red Hat released a new major version of its Enterprise Linux operating system: v9. Thales was able to begin supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 immediately with CipherTrust Transparent Encryption version 7.2.0 as a participant in the Early Adopter Program (EAP). This means that Thales is phasing out support for RHEL v7. Thales tries to maintain the operating system support policy of providing support with CipherTrust Transparent Encryption for the two latest major versions of an operating system as outlined in this guide. Accordingly, Thales has shifted to a One-Off manual qualification process on a need-only basis for RHEL 7.9 kernels. Thales understand that this is a highly adopted and widely used operating system, so Thales is willing to extend CipherTrust Transparent Encryption support for a grace period to allow customers to move their RHEL 7 systems to a newer version before removing support.

According to Red Hat support portal, End of “Maintenance Support 2 (Product Retirement)” from Red Hat for RHEL 7 will be June 30, 2024. Thales would like to align, as best as possible, to this date.

Thales will review the need for supporting RHEL 7 during the Extended Lifecycle Support (ELS) which ends, June 30, 2026, and it will only be available to customers with additional extended support contracts for CipherTrust Transparent Encryption agents.

Thales will provide priority bug fixes on an as-needed basis and technical support for customers with paid support contracts. Thales will not add any new features, enhancements, performance improvements, update third party databases or provide application interoperability support on the CipherTrust Transparent Encryption agents for RHEL 7.