Red Hat shift from CentOS Linux to Stream: What does this mean for Zimbra customers? We’re here for you!

Hello Zimbra Partners, Customer and Friends,

As you may know, Red Hat shifted their investment from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream to drive Linux innovation. At the end of this year, maintenance releases for CentOS Linux 8 will end. Therefore, CentOS Linux 8, as a rebuild of RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, will end. Maintenance releases for CentOS Linux 7 will continue until 6/30/2024. However, there won’t be a production-stable version of CentOS after June 2024.

What does this mean for Zimbra customers?

Most important, don’t panic. We will continue to provide binaries for download as long as CentOS 8 is available and supported. And the Zimbra Team is constantly looking at stable and production-grade OS options for our customers. Zimbra supports RHEL and will continue to support that platform moving forward, so RHEL remains a viable option for Zimbra customers.

CentOS Linux is a rebuild of the RHEL source code, with Red Hat’s branding removed and without Red Hat commercial support. CentOS is binary compatible with RHEL. While any Linux distribution that is binary compatible with RHEL should work with Zimbra, we perform validation and other Quality Assurance assessments only on a select few. Zimbra will continue to evaluate other Linux distributions that are binary compatible with RHEL, and we will validate one to take the place of CentOS in 2H 2021. We also commit to support Ubuntu 20 in 1H 2021 (adding to our support of Ubuntu 16 and 18).

Next Steps 

If you invested in CentOS Linux 7, we recommend that you stay there for now and start to evaluate binary-compatible options by the beginning of 2024. It’s possible that the same market pressures that drove the original creation of CentOS will drive the creation of another high-profile, binary-compatible product (e.g. Rocky Linux).  If you are running on CentOS 8, you should start planning next steps to move to another supported OS version.

Zimbra’s Commitment

Zimbra will continue to provide flexibility for deployments in your Linux OS environments, since we highly value your commitment to Zimbra. We also value your feedback, so please let us know what distribution you are considering for the future.