Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) customers can bring their existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) subscriptions through the RHEL Bring Your Own Subscription (BYOS) program. Today, we’re excited to announce RHEL platform images for OCI, giving customers an additional option to purchase RHEL directly through OCI. These platform images bring image selection, purchase, updates, and support into a unified OCI-native experience. Customers can select a RHEL platform image through the OCI Console, command line interface (CLI), or API and use Oracle Universal Credits to pay for RHEL usage. These usage charges are additional to OCI infrastructure charges, with pricing details available in the Oracle Cloud Price List. Once an instance is running, customers can access RHEL software packages and updates through OCI-hosted Red Hat Update Infrastructure (RHUI), with support provided by Oracle and Red Hat.

Available at launch

Customers can select platform images for RHEL 9.8 or RHEL 10.2. We plan to build on this initial portfolio by adding more versions and shape configurations as they complete certification.

These images are available on the following x86 virtual machine shapes:

  • Standard Flex VM shapes: VM.Standard3.Flex, VM.Standard.E4.Flex, VM.Standard.E5.Flex, and VM.Standard.E6.Flex
  • Dense I/O VM shapes: VM.DenseIO.E4.Flex and VM.DenseIO.E5.Flex

RHEL platform images are available in OCI commercial regions (OC1), and we plan to extend RHEL platform-image availability to Oracle Alloy and OCI Dedicated Region (DRCC) soon. For more details, see RHEL platform-image documentation for region availability and OCI Compute shapes for shape characteristics and details.

Updates and support

OCI-provided RHEL platform images are configured to connect to OCI-hosted regional RHUI, which synchronizes RHEL content from Red Hat. Customers can use this service to apply available updates to running instances, while Oracle publishes updated platform images as Red Hat makes new builds available for supported RHEL releases. For new instances, customers can select the latest available platform image in each version family and refer to the OCI images catalog and release notes for version details and changes.

Oracle provides Tier 1 and Tier 2 support for OCI-provided RHEL platform images, helping customers with installation, configuration, usage, and troubleshooting. When an issue needs deeper investigation or a fix from Red Hat, Oracle works with Red Hat to address it. Customers continue working with Oracle Support throughout. For BYOS deployments, RHEL licensing and operating system support remain with Red Hat under the customer’s existing subscription, while Oracle continues to support the OCI infrastructure.

Getting Started

To launch an OCI-provided RHEL platform image in the OCI Console:

  1. Open Compute, select Instances, and choose Create instance.
  2. Under Image and shape, select Change image. Choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the desired version.
  3. Select a supported shape and create the instance.

For more details on this workflow, see Creating an OCI Compute instance and OCI-provided RHEL platform-image documentation. Customers can also automate instance creation with the OCI CLI instance launch command or the LaunchInstance API.