OpenShift home lab and 1-year subscriptions?

[DanL]

I'll keep this short. I've been a long time user of the free developer license subscription so I can practice Red hat specific skills in my home lab. The yearly renewal RHEL the limit of 16 licenses for RHEL are a great benefit.

I want to expand my knowledge on the OpenShift platform, but the best that I seem to be able to get is a one-time 90-day license. Doing this in my own time after hours at my own expense, the actual keyboard time I have of that 90-day license is only a handful of days. (Yes, I know that's a me problem.)

I've mentioned this to my sales team a few times, and they were trying to work a longer license but that won't apply to the free developer subscription I've been using. And I wouldn't feel right (not to mention unethical at best), using my work subscription to set up a home lab.

Microsoft and other vendors have developer licenses that include all of their products for an entire year. I realize the Red Hat developer license is 100% free of cost to me, but if there was a reasonably priced (< $250/year) option that would add a one-year subscription for all Red Hat products. I would jump at that in a heartbeat.

[EelcoM]

You can setup a Openshift cluster for developement purposes using the developer license. This way you can get a 60 day trial license for openshift. According the thread https://www.reddit.com/r/openshift/comments/xe0bvm/hej_anyone_knows_if_on_the_developer_free_licence... you will be able to continue using it after 60 days. 

[DanL]

Thanks for the response @EelcoM .

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@EelcoM wrote:

[...] get a 60 day trial license for openshift. According the thread https://www.reddit.com/r/openshift/comments/xe0bvm/hej_anyone_knows_if_on_the_developer_free_licence... you will be able to continue using it after 60 days. 

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TL;DR: My experience is the "continue using it" is too limited to be of use.

Last fall (late Oct 2024) I went the 60-day trial license with my devloper account and it installed great.  I used my time over the holiday breaks I had and made enough progress I started deploying PiHole (replacing an old RPi), deploying some VMs to learn more about OpenShift Virtualization and those went well.

In January (after the 60-day expired), the GUI showed it was "expired" but I could still do OpenShift updates, stop/start containers and VMs, etc.  Seeing this I thought that the expired date was a gentle warning/reminder since the main functionality continued to work.

Late January (the week before posting this thread) I was resuming some of my K8s and OSVirt experimentation and they weren't working as they did in the fall.  New VMs were deploying but not powering on.  The original VMs deployed pre-expiration would power on/off/reboot but if I deleted and rebuilt a new VM, the new one deployed post-expiration didn't power on either (it's been a while, but that's what I remember).  Since these were simple Ansible scripts I was pretty confident the process wasn't to blame.  Manually deploying a new virtual machine also failed.

I've got a friend who works in Red Hat and they assured me that the Developer license includes OpenShift and doesn't have this expiration - he's checking on that again when it came up earlier this week.  If I remember correctly, my attepmting to get a new 60-day license (annoying, but not a deal breaker) wasn't possible (a single subscription per dev account), which led to my discussion with my Red Hat sales team (mentioned in the original post).

I might be able to attempt re-installing once again and see if the single subscription limit is still enforced, but that won't be anytime soon and I'm not confident since I haven't heard any OpenShift changes related to the free developer license.