Enterprises that used the “Self-support” tariff plan, drew attention to a significant increase in the subscription cost when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server in virtual machines. Red Hat has deprecated the old self-support subscription (RH0197181) in favor of Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server Entry Level, Self-support (RH00005). At the same time, the sale of new subscriptions RH0197181 was discontinued back in 2015.
The old and new rates imply the refusal to receive technical support services and are sold at one price – $ 349 per year. The difference is that the new tariff allows the use of RHEL only on physical servers, while the old one allowed installing the distribution kit on virtual machines. In addition, the new tariff has a note that it is not intended for production environments. Thus, users running RHEL in virtual machines are now forced to use the standard plan with technical support, which costs $ 799 per year.
In addition, Red Hat representatives explained that the expanded program after the classic CentOS collapsed Red Hat Developer, which lets you use RHEL for free in environments of up to 16 virtual or physical systems, is only available to individual developers, not to enterprises. Those. Company employees may use Red Hat Developer subscription distributions for personal use only, but commercial use of RHEL in an enterprise requires a license purchase.