Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

It depends on the company environment and client environment. Currently, we are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for application deployment and server management, and sometimes we use it for DB deployment also.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for learning purposes for new things in Red Hat technology.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers a very easy-to-use experience in the Linux environment apart from any other flavors, and it's a very easy, systematic structure that provides easy support from Red Hat if any complex issue arises, which is the best point of RHEL, along with its affordable subscription model.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) saves time, saves money, and it's very easy for automation purposes; we support third-party tools for automation, so it's very beneficial.

I see a return on investment from using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because patching is very easy; it supports third-party tools such as BMC or BigFix, so it's very time-saving for patching and performing any operation to fetch data from multiple servers.

To improve Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), they have to provide a playground for their OS for free or for some time, or they have to provide OpenShift multitenant clusters for improving skills in Red Hat technologies and in RHEL also, which will be very easy for a growing career in technology and providing support in an organization.

They have to make it easier to raise a ticket for Red Hat. Currently, when we raise a ticket, they show multiple options, so they should provide a direct option for raising the support cases.

They should provide patches on a quarterly basis instead of monthly, as patching every month makes it a burden on us.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since my career started in 2020.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is stable. In my last five years of experience, I haven't encountered any stability issues when everything is done properly.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has good scalability, and with the RHEL OpenShift tool, we use the scale up and scale down features.

Customer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is very quick and provides support on call. It's easier to get support from RHEL compared to other enterprises such as IBM.

Positive

We did everything manually before Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but since working with RHEL, we use automation, which saves time and costs.

I am not aware of billing, but for the setup of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it's very easy because we directly get a golden image and replicate to make a new machine, so it can be set up in very little time.

Before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I evaluated other options such as CentOS, Rocky Linux, and Ubuntu. However, RHEL is an enterprise OS that provides multiple features and support, with a very systematic structure.

The Ansible tool is very nice, and currently, they have released OpenShift, which is also a very nice product provided by Red Hat.

I would advise others looking into using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that if they don't have budget issues, they should go for RHEL; otherwise, they can consider AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux, which are also open-source products.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a very nice Linux distribution that provides quick support, and in my last five years in the corporate world, I found it to be a very good OS, but they should lower their charges for mid-scale and startup companies in countries such as India, Bhutan, and Nepal, as they can't afford that much amount in dollars.

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

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are for our private cloud, so we deploy it and use RHEL extensively for that. We set up the environment and their applications will run on our environment, and I work in that architecture space where we will set up the environment for our customers to come and deploy their applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points with all the integrated tools that it brings to us, including all the Ansible Towers that we exceedingly use. My favorite feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is Ansible as a tool to work on RHEL. The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) reduces the operational overheads and helps keep us autonomous, allowing us to move faster with less time.

AI features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) would be an improvement because they reduce operational time and help administrators with features such as finding and troubleshooting issues and resolving them automatically.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for about a year.

The stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is, so far, very good.

Regarding scalability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) keeps up with our demands, so I think it is on par, as we've been partnering for a long time.

I would evaluate the customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as great. From one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as an eight.

Security requirements were definitely a consideration before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The reason security requirements were considered is that it's just part of our bread and butter as a company, and we would not be able to do anything without security.

Currently, we are not in the middle of any migrations or upgrades regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so it's running what we have right now, and that's what we're focusing on.

I am not directly involved in managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems when it comes to provisioning and patching, but I have teammates who do that, and they seem to have a very good experience.

From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the platform itself; I would say it's a good investment that keeps our job running.

My assessment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s built-in security features is that I have had good experiences so far. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped me to mitigate downtime and lower risks, though the specific details are confidential at this time.

The improvements with AI in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are exciting, as I was attending one of the sessions, and RHEL 10 with AI is already coming. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10, I look forward to seeing the AI features they were describing.

I assess the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as pretty good; there is still extensive documentation that I constantly refer to if I get stuck. My advice to any other company that's thinking about choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as their solution is to try it out and find out for yourself. I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) overall as an eight.

My use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is for on-premise vertical solutions, but everything is on-premise. The main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include enterprise applications, such as databases and enterprise web applications, or security applications like WebSphere.

I find the most valuable aspect of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is its stability in working with other enterprise devices, such as firewalls and centralized storage. Enterprise applications and devices communicate well with RHEL, and it provides appropriate drivers for those enterprise devices. However, apart from that, I see almost the same performance with other open-source distributions like Ubuntu or Debian.

When assessing the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I find their documentation online to be excellent. I would rate the experience I have had with the documentation or knowledge base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as excellent, giving it a ten out of ten. It is very good and useful for other Linux distributions as well.

The most important security feature in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is similar to that of other distributions, such as user creation and minimum privileges during the operating system's operation. In enterprise environments, I don't notice anything special in terms of security compared to others; it interacts very well with enterprise devices like firewalls and storage solutions.

RHEL has its own firewall, which is SE Linux, and I consider that to be a remarkable security feature. I have not tried Red Hat Insights; I don't know how to use that feature of Red Hat. Regarding the Image Builder or System Roles in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I haven't used them; I only use the ISO image directly for installation.

The solution has high pricing.

My overall usage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been uninterrupted. In total, it has been three years.

In terms of Red Hat support, I haven't used it, as everything I need to solve is in the documentation, which is very good.

Positive

I have previously used other solutions like Debian or Ubuntu.

I switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) based on the direct requirements of the customer, not by my own decision.

The initial setup of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is straightforward; I find it very easy to set up.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) indicates that this was the main topic that made me step away from RHEL. Personally, I don't see good benefits from their support and paid licensing compared to completely free and well-documented Linux distributions, as I find RHEL excessively expensive. Normally, the customer asks for a three-year licensing agreement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as a nine technically, however, considering the cost, I would rate it a six, since it is very expensive. Combining technical and financial aspects, I give it a seven out of ten.

My main use cases are related to Ansible, mostly involving software automation, software installation automation, and data collection.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has less overhead compared to other operating systems for my company. The command line interface is much easier to use—there's not as much navigating around screens. The command line interface is much easier to instruct and manage in that sense.

There's less overhead than using Microsoft products in general, as is the case with the Linux operating systems. I enjoy the command line interfaces a lot more than the UI. For me, that's a plus, but it's also nice to have the GUI interface on top of that if I need to.

The seamless integration with Ansible is always a plus. I can just get it running. Podman, as well, is valuable. Having it just there and ready to use is such a quality of life increase. I don't have to mess around with dependencies. 

It's been good and reliable. I haven't dealt with it much, but I would say Podman and containerization could use a little more work, although I don't know exactly how that would proceed. 

The UI could use a little bit of work. The graphical interface could be improved. I'm not too big of a fan of it right now, but some of that can be customized. Right out of the box, I'm not the biggest fan of how it looks, but that's personal.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for about two years now. I've been dabbling in it on and off. I started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and went all the way up to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 most recently.

It's very reliable. It's fairly robust. I haven't had many issues with it.

I haven't had any issues with customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Their customer service has been great.

Positive

It's seamless. When it comes to managing my Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems, I most often do manual patching, and it's not any more challenging than any other system I've dealt with, so it's standard in that sense. 

For me, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is ease of use and quality of life.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a nine out of ten.

My main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is for the central monitoring of the operations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points by enabling faster transactions and more transactions.The feature I like the most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is its resilience.A huge amount of transactions benefits my organization because we use this cluster to include the performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risk.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could be improved with frequent updates.I think frequent upgrades should be included in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

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

I would assess the stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by stating that it is very secure, reliable, and fast.I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales effectively with the growing needs of my organization.I have not experienced any issues with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as good, and we have vendor coordination with them.On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as an eight because it needs the streamlining of things.

Positive

Prior to adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I was using a platform from IBM initially, which was pushed into containerization.

I would describe my experience with deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as not complicated and manageable, and that works well.

I manage my Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems with mass provisioning and patching, and I am very satisfied with the management experience.I managed the expansion on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as well.

I have not really seen an ROI with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that pricing is heavy on this.The setup cost and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) involves a perpetual license.

The other solutions I considered before selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) included open source options.What stood out to me in my evaluation process of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that the main feature is security on top of the open source, and we are considering the open-source platform to be implemented.

The complexity of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) comes from the methodology, which is complex.Security requirements were a consideration in choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).My assessment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s built-in security features is that it is effective when it comes to simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance.My upgrade and migration plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to stay current include frequent patching and upgrades annually.I assess the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as good for a few use cases.The factors that led me to consider the change to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) were stability and reliability.I would describe my experience with deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as not complicated and manageable, and that works well.I have no advice to give to other organizations considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I would rate this product a nine overall.

I am working on a Cloud Infra project in which many analytics applications are hosted on Cloud Infra, and their applications are hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The applications are customer-facing and mainly focus on analytics regarding an automotive company.

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was pretty smooth, as we can subscribe the servers from the RHEL portal.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on both on-premises and public cloud.

One of the best features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that it is lightweight and it is the industry standard.

Whenever I start the servers, they switch on very fast compared to other Linux servers.

We can deploy clusters in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and we can scale up and scale down our infrastructure with the help of the RHEL server.

The subscription model and vendor support are also good. We can subscribe our servers to RHEL so that we can get the packages installed for our project-related dependencies.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has positively impacted my organization. The speed of the applications has improved after deploying them on RHEL.

Whenever we face an issue and need to reboot the server, it comes up very fast compared to other servers, and it has improved the latency of our applications.

Time has been saved since using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and the application performance has improved after using it.

There should be some automation for patching the servers in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Patching in the sense that automatically, whatever servers we need, we can patch them using a utility present inside RHEL.

It is stable, but compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu is more stable for Kubernetes and Docker-related applications. If improvements can be made in RHEL so Docker and Kubernetes-based applications can be deployed more easily, that would be great.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the past six months.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales up very easily, and RHEL vendor support is also good; it has helped us many times.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from the start; we can see that RHEL provides good vendor support and bug fixes.

Positive

We did not evaluate any other options before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I can see more improvements can be added to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). They provide many certifications such as RHCE and RHCSA which are very important for learning Linux, learning about automation, and deploying the servers in the cloud.

The architect-level certifications are very important. The customer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) rates around an eight.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a great platform to learn Linux. Red Hat provides many certifications such as RHCSA, RHCE, and RHCA, which is architect level.

RHCA is an architect-level certification through which you can learn Ansible and many automation-related activities in Linux; it can help you grow your Linux knowledge as a professional in the IT industry.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an 8.5 out of 10.

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.

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.