Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

Our main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) at our company involve it being our primary operating system for most of our servers. We're about 80% Red Hat Linux, 20% Windows.

The feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) I appreciate the most is the ability to build images from the Red Hat pipeline, which is very effective. 

We also have an on-prem image management system that works really well with Red Hat. These features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) benefit our company since they allow us to perform life cycle tasks faster.

Our upgrade or migration plans to stay current with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that our operating strategy is to put all net new on 8.10, and we are going to stay on 8.10 until 9.10. We typically just stay on the long-term release.

As for how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved, besides being cheaper, I am uncertain. From a technical perspective, everything is addressed, which is part of the reason why we have as many systems as we do. It's probably one of the reasons why we moved away from SUSE Linux all those years ago, and cheaper pricing would definitely be beneficial.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for approximately ten years. I've only been with the company for three years, and Red Hat has been there since before I arrived.

Regarding stability and reliability, we haven't had any issues with Red Hat VMs crashing due to a Red Hat issue.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales with the growing needs of our company quite effectively, as we're still on-prem and a VMware shop, so it functions seamlessly. Many of our applications scale really well, with some having several hundreds of VMs, which we couldn't accomplish on Windows.

The customer service and technical support experience is good. We have many highly qualified senior tenured engineers with Red Hat, so there are very few instances where we need to call somebody for assistance. It's usually account-related or access-related, not normally technical issues.

Historically, we used SUSE Linux before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Our architecture doesn't get hands-on. We guide and influence, so we have done upgrades over the years. We've done upgrades on upgrades on upgrades over the years. We typically don't do cross-version migrations if we can avoid it. It's a lot cleaner to do migration from major revision to major revision.

From a technical perspective, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that compatibility and supportability are easier to adopt. There's a wider range of things that support it, and it has a larger community for getting support compared to Windows. From a server perspective, it functions better, and there are better capabilities for getting things to work and supporting any issues that might occur.

I'm not involved in the pricing, setup costs, or licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I hear that it's expensive, but everything is getting expensive these days, so I don't think it's Red Hat specific. VMware's kickoff after the Broadcom acquisition has created a catalyst for everybody to increase their prices.

I haven't considered changing to other solutions since CentOS went their own route. For the most part, everything is Red Hat for us. It just depends on the capabilities that determine what version we run. 8.10 is the standard, but before eight, we would have several instances on 7.5, 7.3, depending on the features and capabilities the application needed. If it was just a generic application without special requirements, we usually put them on the latest version.

When it comes to managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems regarding provisioning and patching, we are moving to Ansible. We are on VMware's vRealize operations and orchestration, and we are moving all of our management and deployment strategies to Ansible. We are transitioning to Ansible since we have so many different systems and ecosystems that we need to touch; having one platform rule them all makes it easier for life cycle management and deployment. Ansible allows us to do everything in one seamless pipeline versus having to run five different automations for standing up a VM, standing up storage, and creating firewall rules.

I'm not very familiar with Red Hat Enterprise Linux's (RHEL) built-in security features when it comes to simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance. Cybersecurity requirements are abstracted from us, and they have their own tool suites, but we do have integrations with Red Hat. We use CrowdStrike, Carbon Black, and Rapid7, and all of those tools have integrations or abilities with Red Hat, so we leverage those tools but nothing is necessarily native to Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has not helped to mitigate downtime and lower risks any more than any other operating system. The contributing factors of downtime are typically external, whether it's power or networking or storage. In our ecosystem within a Red Hat space, crashes are very infrequent and usually something external.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an eight.

I have been a sysadmin handling everything about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, primarily for on-premises environments. I have built projects based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including development and support projects in the companies. I have handled pretty much everything. Anything you can imagine, I have probably done with it.

In terms of security, it does a lot of things that most people still turn off. SELinux is turned on by default. They have pretty good firewall rules in their defaults. The audit rules always take tweaking, but, overall, it comes out of the box not too bad. I used to write scripts to harden them from there.

There are multiple ways to provision and patch. You have everything from local repositories to doing it by hand.

Their knowledge base is incredible. There is so much information out there. It has never taken me longer than 30 minutes to find an answer to anything, even very tough ones.

One company I worked for was a security company, and we did a lot of patching on everything. It was designed around security and email hosting, and uptime was pretty much whatever we wanted it to be. I have had a couple of times when the uptime was bad, but it was caused by a third-party solution. In fact, the Norton antivirus was definitely the worst. Red Hat had nothing to do with it.

I enjoy the patching processes and the way Red Hat Enterprise Linux has elements set up. I have never had a patch session fail, even when installing a thousand packages at a time. 

Their implementation of Yum is effective. I have used it quite a bit to pull additional information out because, for a while, I was doing security work. It is nice to have all the security information they provide on the inside. Their security library is well-maintained. I have used it exclusively for 15 years now, and I have been nothing but happy with it.

I wish IBM would give them more leeway. IBM seems to have restricted Red Hat Enterprise Linux more since the acquisition.

The organization moved away from Red Hat because IBM introduced paywalls and additional barriers that did not exist before, which made everything a lot harder. They moved from there to the Rocky version, which is a fork of Red Hat. It is run by people who have left IBM or Red Hat engineers who left IBM. Giving Red Hat Enterprise Linux more independence could be beneficial.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux exclusively for about 15 years.

It has demonstrated great stability, with systems running for multiple years without issues. I have no problem with uptime. It is as long as you want it to be.

It offers excellent scalability. The HPC system that the organization runs is a small one, but it has 8,000 computers. Each computer has at least 24 to 72 CPUs in it, and everything runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Rocky. It is eminently capable. They run jobs because they do some of the hurricane forecasting and things. The things that they run on it take 900 nodes and 70,000 CPUs. You walk into that data center, the air comes out of the floor at 50 degrees. By the time it gets through the computers, it is about 110, so they are working them hard. The room itself stays at about 90.

Before the acquisition by IBM, support was incredible. I could directly engage with developers and get immediate assistance. It was great. 

I have not had a lot of experience with them post-acquisition. At this point, the entire department is moving to Rocky. It is not a huge change for me, but a part of the move was the lack of support through IBM.

Positive

The company we are contacted with has just moved from Red Hat to Rocky, which is Red Hat-based. It is a fork of Red Hat, so it is like all Red Hat derivatives. It is binary compatible. You can do anything you want with it. For the things the organization does with the HPC environment, it is a lot nicer because there are fewer restrictions. Open source works best for HPC environments. You have to recompile a lot of drivers and things to get things to work. Being able to do that is critical in that business.

For the most part, upgrades and migrations are very straightforward. In one of the cases, it was very straightforward to install the OS, but it was a lot more problematic to find all the pieces that ran the underlying hardware and get those working right. We had to do a lot of testing between lots of different versions of both the OS and the hardware drivers before we found good combinations. From what I hear, going from Red Hat to Rocky was a lot cleaner than going from Red Hat 6 to Red Hat 7. That was a big change.

In terms of maintenance, for the most part, once you get it set, you can walk away from it.

I do not have any insights, but I know why the prices went up. At the time, it made sense. I do not know what the pricing is like now. Previously, the pricing model was advantageous as it allowed unlimited installations for a single price, focusing on support. The recent introduction of paywalls complicates the cost landscape.

I have used the web console, but I am more of a command-line person. I did not see a lot of use for it, but I have used it in the HPC world because you can do some things that are handy, such as pulling in entire groups of things and building them as a boot group. It is nice to have when you need it.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that it has been part of our core delivery solutions for many industries, mostly for telecom.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I find most valuable include all of the features since system V. 

In my organization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) provides an agnostic interface for many storage vendors that we deal with, which helps us to have a wider spectrum of offerings in our consultancy offerings.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved by adopting a feature similar to YaST from a big European competitor, which would significantly enhance Red Hat technologies.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since 2005 when it was in release four, which makes it 20 years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as favorable, noting that during the last five years, we've experienced fewer crashes and downtimes compared to other commercial Unix and Linux distributions in the market.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales excellently with the growing needs of my organization, and I would rate it ten out of ten.

I evaluate customer service and tech support as excellent; with either the partner portal or customer portal, we receive very good RCAs and analyses for any case we submit to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as ten out of ten.

Positive

Prior to adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I was using Commercial Unix, Oracle Solaris. The factor that led me to change was that during the last decades, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has absorbed many features straight from Solaris, enabling us to perform effective migrations from Commercial Unix to RHEL.

At the very beginning, at the earliest versions of Red Hat since version six, there was a kernel that was not compatible with many cluster vendors, and that's why we were adopting another vendor of Linux. However, we've seen that during these past years, Red Hat has been experiencing a lot of enhancements overcoming these kinds of barriers. And now Red Hat has become more versatile in accepting more hardware that allows us to standardize our Red Hat offerings in our consultancy services.

I have seen a return on investment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). For data points, in one of the key industries I handle, which is telecom, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been one of the key strategic providers offering a good price to implement automation and containerization across all of the network elements we manage with several vendors, and in the latest five years, we have observed a good investment return in terms of ROI.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that I strongly believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers a good relationship between value and price, and despite it being quite pricey, it's definitely worth it.

Before selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I considered SLES, which is a competitor of Red Hat.

My advice to other organizations considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is to have a good plan and to establish the relationship as a key strategic reference for any upcoming migration. The partnership and customer support provided is a high-value option. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped mitigate downtime and lower risk through high availability solutions and key features that enable network redundancy, allowing us to achieve this. 

I would assess the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as excellent because it has become one of the key standards in the industry for following guidelines according to any topic in the RHEL environment. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution an eight.

My main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is for all the tasks, which can be utility services or web services, DNS, NTP, or identity service as well as mail service in my day-to-day work.

The best features Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers are that it's a well-managed operating system, and I can use anything regarding the system and other features.

It is good for performance, reliability, and updates.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has positively impacted my organization because its improved security helped our team to maintain compliance issues, even though it's a bit complex.

It's acceptable to work with the current system and current initiation regarding how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could be improved; I don't have significant frustrations.

The GUI operation needs to be improved, especially for day-to-day desktop operations.

I'm working about 10 years in my current field.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is stable in my experience.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a highly scalable solution, and it can handle growth and increased demand well.

The customer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is exceptional; I have interacted with their support team, and it's awesome.

I rate the customer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a 9 out of 10.

We used Oracle Linux before Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but I prefer RHEL now.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) saved our money and is good, which indicates we've seen a return on investment.

We have evaluated Ubuntu before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I absolutely give others looking into using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) the advice to adopt RHEL for their other production systems. On a scale of 1-10, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a 10.

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and we have a couple of customers using OpenShift, the Kubernetes platform based on Red Hat, and also Red Hat Virtualization. My first contact with the Linux platform was with Red Hat.

The best features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are its stability and the RPM, Red Hat Package Manager, which is perfect. They also deliver Satellite, a platform for updates. It is a very robust, excellent platform.

For me, and for every Linux distribution, the most important security feature in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is SELinux. Security is often misunderstood by others. SELinux is very important because it provides security for the kernel. Many people disable SELinux, but it is the most important and most misunderstood feature. People do not understand it. The updates and SELinux are very important to me. SELinux is very good, but it is complex, and I have seen many administrators disable it because instead of helping them, it causes trouble. For example, securing my NGINX configuration is a pain. It is a very good security option, but I would say it is excellent only if one is an expert.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) documentation is very good and very complete. Regardless of my opinion about the IBM acquisition, the documentation is excellent.

IBM committed two major mistakes with Red Hat. The first was destroying the CentOS project, which was a fork of Red Hat. The second was limiting the use of free options and restricting hardware to support Red Hat on just some limited hardware. One can use the system for free, but the statement is not entirely true because it is limited to a couple of virtual processors and I do not remember if it was 24 or 16 GB of RAM. If one goes beyond that configuration, one has to pay, and IBM is IBM. Many companies were in trouble because from one day to the next, IBM said they would no longer support CentOS and told them to move to another distribution. People had to migrate, and for that reason, there are Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux, and other Linux distributions that are trying to rise and taking advantage of that situation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is just for corporate companies with money to waste on licensing.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is very expensive. In the case of our customers, the couple of customers with OpenShift, they have enough money to license Red Hat. They bundle Red Hat with virtualization and OpenShift packages. However, it is not suitable for an SMB company. It is not payable or affordable. For me, it is very expensive.

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a lot, though I do not remember the exact frequency.

I have worked with Red Hat support, and it is very good because they have very good engineers. In Latin America, during my time, the support in Spanish was mostly provided by engineers from Argentina. In Colombia, I have worked with a couple of engineers from Colombia, and they were very good. I have not worked with support in English for Red Hat, only in Spanish with those engineers.

Positive

My first Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) certification, Red Hat Certified Engineer, was for version 6, which was approximately 12 to 15 years ago.

I have tried Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Image Builder and System Roles, and it is pretty good.

I would rate the support at an eight out of ten. My overall rating for this product is ten out of ten.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are for work and business-critical applications.

My company benefits from these features as our systems must remain operational. When systems go down, it results in significant monetary losses per hour, so having RHEL running and security patches available quicker than other distributions is crucial for maintaining satisfaction.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points. It's a good server operating system, better than all the alternatives, with full support and stability whereas many other Linux distros may be more flighty and not as stable. 

It's more reliable, more stable, and doesn't break down. Stability is the feature of RHEL that I appreciate the most since systems remain operational without rebuilds. Security and stability are definitely important aspects.

We manage our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for provisioning and patching using Red Hat Satellite for patch management, which is acceptable but could use some modernization, and we also use Ansible for configuration management. I'd prefer to see those two tools work better together, and if we could use configuration as code for Red Hat Satellite, it would make it even better.

I have been involved in RHEL upgrades and migrations in general. The process typically involves rebuilding and migrating; we rebuild the OS and migrate. We have tried the upgrade-in-place method, but it can be very lengthy and has more room for errors. Generally, we build new and migrate over first, and if we can't do that, we'll do the upgrade-in-place for applications that people understand, really just needing the same setup as before.

I would suggest to RHEL to maintain vigilance on vulnerabilities and resolve them more quickly. People compare other operating systems based on vulnerabilities. I know that RHEL is stable, but other teams might look at the overall vulnerability counts. Maintaining performance is also important; RHEL has very good performance, so maintaining those fundamentals is crucial as that's what people sometimes seek.

To make it a perfect ten, I would suggest there is always room for improvement; reducing the frequency of changes would help. There are always significant changes, such as with SystemD, and I understand that's more of the community driving much of this change. Other changes are coming through, such as changing command names. Maintaining backwards compatibility would help turn a nine, which is already very good, into a ten.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for approximately 12 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is stable and secure; these are the two biggest factors that drive our usage.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales very with the growing needs of my company. It can natively handle however many servers we need to deploy. 

We can manage anything we need to do, and now that we can do it all as code, that enables scaling. RHEL natively works very with code, and everyone that manages Linux in our company does it either through command line or code, which differs from the Windows experience and helps us scale.

The customer service and technical support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is good. That said, it depends on who you get and how they understand our problems. Sometimes our problems are simple and sometimes very complex. Generally, we're able to get our issues resolved with minimal intervention or administrative burden.

We consider other solutions while using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and we're constantly looking at other vendors. Their products aren't as good; they might be less expensive, however, they aren't as fully developed.

Cloud licensing is confusing. We have subscriptions available to us, which is why we opted for bring-your-own-subscription. However, even then, the options make deployment difficult since we need to ensure the OS is registered to our satellite system for subscription management, not through the cloud services.

We decided to bring our subscription instead of purchasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on AWS Marketplace.

From my perspective, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is its stability and support, with stability being a core fundamental.

My experience with pricing and setup costs indicates that licensing is confusing in the cloud. We have subscriptions available to us, which is why we opted for bring-your-own-subscription.

Some other solutions we consider include Canonical and Ubuntu, which sometimes perform better in the desktop world since they have support for desktop distributions. SUSE is another option we consider; those are the big three, and we wouldn't consider anything outside of that group extensively.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a nine out of ten.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) at this company include the development environment, where the dev environment is all in Linux. It's a server where you connect to via PuTTY, and it's currently running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.

My favorite feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that it's a Linux server with Linux commands. These features have benefited my company by making it feel lightweight. If you know Linux commands, you can connect to it and still be able to navigate within that Linux environment. The benefit is that if you onboard a new developer and they know Linux commands, they could just jump on it immediately.

From a user standpoint, every time they do an upgrade or they bring down the Linux server, I have to re-clone all my repositories. Perhaps they could just migrate them over so I don't have to do all that cloning again, because I have three different repos that I have to clone. This has happened twice. I am uncertain how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved beyond this.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) at my company for two and a half years, ever since I started.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped mitigate downtime and lower risk for what we use it for because we use it to host a Docker container and for the development environment. From my standpoint, it has been beneficial because we're using it as a development environment to test out new features, which helps mitigate unwanted bugs.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales with the growing needs of my company because there have not been any issues with deploying different servers.

I have worked with Goldman Sachs and Bank of America, and they all use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for their Linux servers. I haven't heard of any other solutions being used, though I haven't worked on the DevOps side to set up these systems. In all the environments I've used that are Linux-based, it has been Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps solve pain points by being very easy to connect to, and it has an easy setup, though I didn't set it up as the DevOps people handled that.

I don't manage the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems when it comes to provisioning and patching; there's a DevOps team that handles that. When there is an upgrade, they handle all that after work hours. They bring everything down and then bring up the new servers.

My advice to a company that's thinking of getting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is, as a user, go for it. I don't know any other product besides Linux and Ubuntu, but I think Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is good. 

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a 9 out of 10.

As an end user and a trained engineer working on field development, I am required to use a Linux-based system for all aspects of our work. This includes everything from logical design to design verification, and physical design, all the way to integrating data into the silicon database at the foundry. Since all of this occurs in a Linux environment, I must ensure we have the right platform in place. The performance we achieve with the tools we use can vary significantly across different platforms. Additionally, the support provided by these platforms is crucial. In the field of silicon design, we rely heavily on electronic design automation (EDA) tools, which are continuously being enhanced. As this area evolves, it’s essential for our operating systems to keep pace with the migration of the latest tool versions. If I become stuck with an outdated version of the OS, it can adversely affect my productivity and the quality of my designs. Therefore, I need to be reasonably familiar with various operating system providers and understand the pros and cons of each. This includes comparisons between Red Hat, SUSE, and Ubuntu, which is essential for meeting my requirements.

Since it is widely used, I believe the knowledge base is fairly good. In my own organization, which has three vertical companies, two others were already using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for production. They were asking me to go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) unless I had a compelling reason to go to SUSE or Ubuntu. This indicates that the IT team within my company preferred Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for support and documentation purposes. The company has been around for more than a decade, so familiarity might be one reason, or resistance to change may have been another reason to stick with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In my role as the design manager, I have not heard anything negative about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

My decision to go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was influenced by three main factors:

1. The IT team’s familiarity with Red Hat due to its previous deployment in other units.

2. Competitive pricing, which was 25 to 30 percent lower than other options.

3. The perception that Red Hat offered long-term service pack support for an additional fee; something that other providers like SUSE may not have offered.

Ultimately, the first two reasons were strong enough for me to lean towards Red Hat.

To some extent, I am speculating, but at the end of the day, the main thing we care about is how the resources are getting scheduled and utilized. Without an external load-sharing application, the number of cores in our servers and the memory should all be utilized effectively. If they can do very good dynamic resource allocation, maximizing the number of cores and the memory without external applications, that would be beneficial

Additionally, this is not just for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but for any OS - I would really love to make sure that their security features are robust and getting updated regularly. I believe at a given point of time, they may be very good, but hackers are also improving their techniques. I would definitely expect Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or any OS provider to constantly monitor, understand if there are any new vulnerabilities in their OS, and provide patches or fixes so that we are always guarded from any security threat because what we are developing consists of very important IPs that have to be protected from malware attacks.

The most important thing is that it has to be stable. If it is not stable and we have to reboot it because of something, that would be problematic. The kind of tools it provides natively is important. For example, if I am doing development, I want to have a checkout process. If they have well-developed documentation and the ability to work with the code itself, along with good support for developing, then the performance of the OS would improve. If I see that one of my runs for any workload is taking five days, I immediately question why it is not completing within a day. If the load sharing is not happening correctly, there might be switches or features that the OS provides that can help use more memory or similar resources. Being developer-friendly would be beneficial. One thing managers hate is nasty surprises, so even if something is not working in the OS, it should provide some ability for IT to observe potential issues three or four weeks in advance.

I have only been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for a short duration of time, about six to eight months because the migration happened very recently.

I am working for a startup company. We used to use open source SUSE because that was kind of easy to use and we did not have to spend many dollars. When we reached the point where we had to go to production, we needed to ensure we were using something more reliable because open source is open source. When I go to a newer version or a production version of the OS, some of the designs we are developing will be around because our startup is focusing on accelerators for the cloud. Some of these can be around for seven years, 10 years, and beyond. Hypothetically, even after 10 years, somebody who is using our silicon can find a bug, and we are obligated to fix it through software or other means. If we do not have the OS support at that point in time, because 10 years is a long time, it becomes problematic. When we go towards production, the kind of analysis that I do involves determining how many years this OS is supported and whether they will support it for an extended period, provided I pay them extension money. I am an end user, and I try to look at the facets of the OS based on my current business needs.

When we were using Ubuntu, I initially found it sufficient for my EDA tools under the evaluation licenses I had. However, as I progressed into silicon design and needed to purchase production licenses, I realized that the older version of Ubuntu wasn’t adequate. The question arose: if we were to upgrade to a paid version of the operating system, which one should we choose? I conducted some research comparing Ubuntu and Red Hat, and ultimately decided to go with Red Hat. Once I made that decision, I simply needed to explain my reasoning to my IT team, stating that I wanted to upgrade the twenty or so servers I was using to Red Hat 9.1, or whatever the current version was at that time. They took over from there.

We experienced some initial challenges when we moved to Red Hat, mainly due to the tools' versions. At first, we struggled to navigate these issues, but once I contacted support, they were able to resolve them quickly.

The maintenance is handled by the IT team.

Most of the studies that I did were between Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I did not check extensively on SUSE Enterprise.

I was inclined to choose Red Hat for a couple of reasons. First, the IT team’s familiarity with Red Hat was crucial since it had already been deployed in other areas of the organization. This existing knowledge made the transition smoother.

Additionally, I did not inquire about pricing immediately because, ultimately, my business unit would be responsible for the costs. I recall that the price for Red Hat Enterprise Linux was less than one lakh rupees per license per year. The annual cost might be around 1.2 lakh or slightly more, but it was certainly under that threshold. Furthermore, I believe that if we were to negotiate for a larger number of licenses, we might have received a better rate. Regarding the initial pricing I received, I remember it being about twenty-five percent lower per license per year compared to other options. 

For my use case with EDA tools, Synopsys EDA tools' local AE team said that support in India is better for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Additionally, Ubuntu and SUSE support for 10 years, whereas Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) supports for 10 years plus an extended two to four year period for a cost. Since our chips will be in the cloud market for at least a decade or more, this long-term support influenced my decision.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) revolves around running and managing critical enterprise workloads. We rely on RHEL’s stability and security to support key applications, including Oracle databases, EBS (Enterprise Business Suite), and NMS (Network Management Systems).

One of the standout advantages of RHEL in our infrastructure is its integration with Ansible, which allows us to automate configurations, streamline patch management, and reduce manual intervention across multiple systems. This automation helps us maintain consistency, enhance security, and minimize downtime.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has significantly enhanced our organization's efficiency, security, and automation. As the foundation for our enterprise workloads, RHEL provides a stable and scalable platform that ensures high availability and performance across critical applications. One of the biggest improvements we've seen is through Ansible, which has helped us automate configuration management, deployment, and patching processes. This has not only reduced manual workload but also minimized the risk of human errors, leading to a more resilient infrastructure.

One of the most valuable features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for our organization has been its simplicity and automation capabilities. Managing enterprise workloads can be complex, but RHEL streamlines this through Ansible, allowing us to automate configurations, deployments, and patching. This has significantly reduced manual intervention and improved operational efficiency.

Security is another critical factor, and RHEL’s robust vulnerability management ensures continuous updates for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), keeping our systems protected. The integration of Red Hat Insights allows us to proactively identify and mitigate risks, strengthening our overall security posture.

Additionally, the stability and scalability of RHEL have been essential for supporting key applications like Oracle databases, EBS (Enterprise Business Suite), and NMS (Network Management Systems). The long-term support and extended lifecycle maintenance ensure smooth operations, minimizing downtime and disruptions.

Overall, RHEL’s combination of automation, security, and reliability has enabled us to optimize infrastructure management, improve security, and maintain seamless operations for mission-critical applications.

One significant area for improvement is SAP certification and compatibility. Many large enterprises rely on SAP workloads, and RHEL’s limited official certifications for certain SAP solutions create challenges for businesses looking for seamless integration and performance optimization. Expanding certification coverage and tuning RHEL for SAP applications would strengthen its positioning in enterprise IT landscapes.

Another key improvement would be user-friendly patch management. While RHEL provides strong security updates, further enhancing the patching process—especially with live-patching options—could minimize disruptions and make the update workflow even more intuitive for IT teams managing large deployments.

Additionally, expanded cloud-native support would be beneficial as organizations continue shifting toward hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Strengthening native integrations with cloud service providers, optimizing containerization tools, and improving Kubernetes compatibility could boost RHEL’s efficiency in cloud deployments.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the last ten years.

One of the key contributors to its stability is the predictable release cycle and long-term support. Red Hat provides extended lifecycle maintenance, allowing organizations to run workloads without unexpected disruptions. Additionally, the continuous security updates and proactive vulnerability management reinforce system integrity, reducing potential risks and downtime.

Moreover, RHEL’s robust package management system, combined with Ansible automation, further enhances stability by ensuring consistent configurations across multiple deployments. The ability to automate patching and system updates significantly reduces errors that could impact performance.

Overall, RHEL stands out as a highly stable and dependable solution, making it an excellent choice for enterprises seeking a secure, scalable, and resilient operating system.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is excellent. You just need to search for your concern, and the answer is right there most of the time, and it's accurate. If something isn't there, support is also good. If you log a ticket, the response and the level of attention that you get on a support ticket is very good.

Positive

We are in both the cloud and on-premises with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). On the cloud, we use Azure. On-premises, we have VMware and Nutanix.

I wasn't involved in discussions about considering other solutions before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for my company, however, if that decision came to me, I would have chosen Red Hat since I have previous experience with Red Hat in my last organization. 

We did have SUSE before we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). We still have SUSE since SAP workloads run on SUSE, as they have better collaboration between SAP and SUSE. We tried changing that to Red Hat maybe a year ago, however, the response from the SAP team was not supportive as they wanted to go with SUSE due to some licensing and support models that were not clear to me.

The transition is straightforward. The documentation is great. It's accurate. If you have a Red Hat account, you have access to knowledge articles. 

We're on the cloud and on-prem.

We don't use AWS for purchasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

One of the key areas where we see ROI is through automation with Ansible, which has helped us streamline deployments, patching, and configuration management. This has significantly reduced manual effort and minimized human errors, leading to higher productivity and cost savings.

Another major factor is security and vulnerability management. RHEL provides continuous updates for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), ensuring we remain protected against emerging threats. The ability to implement proactive security measures has reduced downtime and the costs associated with mitigating security incidents.

When considering setup costs, pricing, and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I always advise others to evaluate their organization's scale, workload requirements, and long-term support needs.

RHEL follows a subscription-based model, which ensures access to continuous security updates, patches, and support rather than a one-time licensing fee. While the upfront cost may seem higher compared to some alternatives, the value comes from its predictable pricing, enterprise-grade security, and extensive support ecosystem.

For organizations with large deployments, leveraging Red Hat Satellite and Ansible automation can help reduce administrative overhead, making the investment in RHEL more cost-effective in the long run. Additionally, Red Hat provides different pricing tiers based on usage—ranging from standard support to premium offerings, allowing businesses to tailor the subscription to their specific needs.

For startups or smaller teams, I often recommend exploring Red Hat Developer subscriptions, which provide access to RHEL for development and testing at a reduced cost. Similarly, cloud-based RHEL instances through AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud offer flexible pricing models, allowing businesses to scale efficiently without heavy upfront infrastructure investments.

Ultimately, I advise organizations to conduct a cost-benefit analysis, factoring in security, automation, and long-term stability rather than looking solely at initial setup costs. RHEL's value extends beyond pricing—it’s an investment in reliability and enterprise support."*

No

Our main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) currently involve general server workload, including numerous Oracle-based workloads.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I appreciate the most include the most recent iterations such as no-downtime patching, live patching, and the ability to snapshot or snapshot LVM's; these features are more of a Linux capability, however, they have been really beneficial to us. 

High availability has been extremely beneficial for us to support. These features benefit our company by providing less downtime. We are not taking downtime to do patching on tier-one systems, and we spend less manpower and time to perform the types of automation and management that would normally take considerable time to accomplish hands-on, resulting in significant time savings.

Security requirements are always a consideration in choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the cloud. Anytime we make any decision, security is definitely one of the foremost considerations we have taken place.

The biggest thing we look for is the ability to abide by STIG, as we do, and then apply our NIST policies as well as our defined HIPAA policies; Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) makes that a really easy process through the automation aspects.

We manage our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for provisioning and patching using a combination of VMware vRealize for actual deployment, and then we use Ansible Automation for the day-two configuration and lifecycle. Once software deployments and configurations are all Ansible automation, it couldn't work any better for us. As long as you have a coding background and understand YAML, Ansible works fantastically.

If I had to suggest one improvement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it would be clearer licensing information. There could be easier licensing paths for Red Hat; currently, it's included with many different things, yet just more clearly defined skews would help. That's the main consideration.

We have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for a total of about a decade now.

Regarding stability and reliability, our experience is that we don't have to reboot our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers as we do with Windows servers every 90 days for something bad. 

We only have to reboot our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers for updates or some unusual code push. We can count on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) just as we can count on Cisco UCS.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales fantastically with the growing needs of our company. We have clustered our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers, and as far as size, they far outweigh anything else in the environment. 

Our largest clusters run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and we continue to see that as we grow, it is able to grow with us.

I would evaluate the customer service and technical support of this solution as being excellent when we need them. 

The information in the knowledge base is so readily available that we don't very often have to contact customer service, however, when we do, they are generally very knowledgeable and well-versed in our size.

Positive

Before we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the first time, we were mostly using Windows. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was really our first enterprise Linux that we brought into the environment under the enterprise scale.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the manpower; it's the ability to automate significant management tasks. That is the biggest ROI on the amount of time we spend managing this system, as we can take that time back and dedicate it to other types of innovation.

My experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been pretty consistent, and honestly, compared to the rest of the market, it's pretty fair.

We've certainly considered other solutions before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), including open source; we do use a bit of open source such as Rocky Linux, which most are going to be Red Hat derivatives. We also looked into other options, however, for anything tier one or most tier two, our current tier-one environment is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). From a stability and supportability standpoint, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a clear winner.

Currently, I can't say that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) necessarily supports our hybrid cloud strategy; what it does do is make the deployment of several deployments and conception models much easier for us to consider versus having to do custom imaging for our cloud presence. 

It helps us bring down the amount of time it takes us to deploy.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an 8.