Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

My main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is running virtual machines. That's probably the most important use case for us.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps us solve pain points related to security. We want security, so it is hardened, and just supports us. As a financial institution we take security very seriously.

The feature I appreciate the most from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is support and simplicity. 

The knowledge base is good; they have a lot of documentation. 

We manage our Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems when it comes to provisioning and patching through Ansible. Everything's straightforward and efficient.

Adding more relevant features to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) would be great. I have seen some issues on GitHub where people are suggesting things, such as Ansible. There are many community issues that could be implemented into Red Hat.

We try to stay two versions below the latest one just to make sure that we have security checked there and to avoid running into any bugs or issues with the latest release. We just try to apply patches as much as we can.

The stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are smooth as we have not encountered any problems or issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales perfectly with the growing needs of my company. It's easy to scale up with the tools we have.

My experience with the customer service and technical support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been amazing; they are very helpful. We open up a ticket, and we get someone to help right away.

The deployment is a smooth process. Some of the issues we have are just related to multiple vulnerabilities, and that's on our side to fix, however, everything else is smooth. We have no complaints.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is how they have their foundation set. They have everything organized, documentation's there, it's globally used everywhere, and it's good software with good tools.

I'm not in the pricing conversation. I can't speak to costs.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped me mitigate downtime and lower risks. They specifically thrive on criticism, and they don't take it lightly. They mentioned earlier in the panel that they wanted to prioritize the big CVs and any vulnerability that's important. Although some don't get exploited, it's good to have fewer of those numbers. 

We try to stay two versions below the latest one.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) overall an eight 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.

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.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is used in my organization primarily to install platforms and middleware, such as WebLogic or WebSphere. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) makes it easier to install and run platforms like WebLogic or WebSphere because the installation is more transparent and less complex, and it can be automated more easily with commands.

The best features offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include scalability and ease of use. The aspects of scalability and ease of use that are most valuable for me in my day-to-day work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that it integrates much more easily with automation applications. Java-based platforms run better on those platforms. Antivirus solutions are less invasive on that type of operating system, and the code is more stable and less prone to crashes or instability of the operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has positively impacted my organization as we have practically migrated to installing middleware applications on Red Hat. It is much simpler, there are no library conflicts, there are no conflicts with antivirus, and they are more stable.

A concrete result I have observed after the migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that deployments are now much easier. They went from about six to ten days down to three days for delivering a complete environment across different environments: development, testing, and production. Additionally, the incidents that always caused conflicts with antivirus issues, library blocks, and application blocks that were not allowing installation or access to the operating system were completely eliminated.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is an extremely stable operating system. It is very open in terms of integration with other applications and migrations, and the applications developed for this type of operating system or that support these operating systems are more stable for a financial company like the one I work for.

At the moment, I do not think there is any functionality, documentation, or support that could be optimized. I have not had any problems with it. In fact, external documentation is very extensive, which is a big advantage because you can find documentation through searches on the internet itself.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in my organization for approximately four years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is an extremely stable operating system.

The aspects of scalability and ease of use that are most valuable for me in my day-to-day work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that it integrates much more easily with automation applications.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a rating of 10 because I used to work with Windows and found too many integration issues. Even though it is visually easier, I prefer working with the command line and the stability and scalability.

I use VMware as the private cloud provider to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I hardly handle patching in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but Satellite is used for patching and updates, and I am satisfied with that management experience.

I have not tried tools like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Image Builder or System Roles, so I cannot speak to how useful they are.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is extremely useful and truly well documented.

The most important security features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include user levels, which have very good restrictions at the file level and at the execution level and obviously at the modification level. Additionally, viruses are still very restricted.

An example of a specific situation in which these levels of restriction and security have made a difference for my organization is that end users try to delete files, and it does not allow them. The audit features, which it handles very well, allow you to track down any problem, any execution or modification.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve challenges and pain points in my daily work regarding integration and interaction with artificial intelligence. I gave this review a rating of 10 out of 10.

I am currently working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as I administer a lot of Kubernetes clusters installed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I use it as an operating system for our platform which powers all our company's software, mostly for Kubernetes or for IBM BPM or IBM PEL.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a robust operating system, and I believe it is much better than Windows. I work with Windows and Ubuntu, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the best distribution I have worked with.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is excellent. Red Hat documentation is the most valuable documentation in the market.

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I think the most time-saving aspects come from Red Hat Ansible because we use Ansible to automate many tasks and repetitive tasks on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Windows. Ansible automation and the Ansible automation platform are the most valuable products that save us time and money.

Overall, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me save time through automation using Ansible. For OpenShift, the core of containers saves time by automating the DevOps processes using the Red Hat pipeline built into OpenShift, Tekton, and source-to-image build. All of this saves us time.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps to mitigate downtime and lower risks for me, as most of my work is with OpenShift which enables us to do a zero downtime deployment. The deployment is done without any downtime. Red Hat OpenShift is a stable system. Red Hat OpenShift and Linux are very stable and the downtimes are very minimal.

I think Red Hat needs to implement more AI features in the operating system or Red Hat OpenShift.

I have been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for about 14 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is very stable. The product is very stable and very mature. All issues are documented in documentation or in the support portal and support knowledge base. When I have an issue, I primarily search the knowledge base and the support portal and find the solution. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a very secure operating system, and they provide security patching every month.

I find Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scalable.

We have many cases where Red Hat helped us with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or OpenShift, and their support is great. On a scale of one to ten, where ten is the best, I would rate the tech support a nine.

Positive

Most enterprises work on Linux, and as I am a DevOps and platform engineer, most of our systems run Linux, including Kubernetes, OpenShift, and the DevOps pipeline, all working on Linux. This is why I switched to Linux.

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the setup is very straightforward. OpenShift is a little complex, but once you do it once, you will master it.

I performed the deployment all by myself.

When it comes to our business value, most of our customers are enterprise-grade customers from banking and government sectors, and they prefer to use an enterprise-grade operating system, not Ubuntu or CentOS. Additionally, in many cases, we need enterprise support from Red Hat as Ubuntu does not provide this.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on and off for at least 10 years, as I've changed many companies. My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are mostly on the server-side for deployment.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I most appreciate are the inbuilt commands and the packages that come with it, which are pretty helpful for us, as we usually deal with a lot of shell scripting. These features benefit my organization by allowing us to write cron jobs and related tasks.

I don't have much to say about how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved.

I have been working in my current field for 20 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve the pain point of periodically needing to keep it updated, but apart from that, it's very stable, which is one of the best things about it. We have already expanded usage.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales very well with the growing needs of my organization, and within on-prem, it's very easy to scale it, so we've never had any problems. The process has been smooth; even on-prem, it's all automated, and we are using OpenShift, so using that software makes it very easy to scale.

I evaluate customer service and technical support from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as very good; I have personally called customer support and was surprised at how easy it is to get a hold of someone. It was easy for them to come to a solution.

Positive

Prior to adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), my company was using different Linux environments before moving to RHEL, although mostly the companies that I've worked in have always used Linux for deployment.

The deployment model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) includes both on-premise and cloud, as we are using OpenShift for on-prem and cloud also.

We have our migration and upgrade team which manages Linux; as soon as the new, stable version of Linux becomes available, we try to update our Linux version to the latest.

I have seen a return on investment with the solution; in our team, we have noticed that the cost doesn't increase drastically, and it's a very stable product, although this is not my domain since mine is very specific, mostly development.

Before selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), my company considered different Linux environments, as I have worked in Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu, but I feel most companies now are adopting or going with RHEL due to its stability and better pricing; again, this is not my domain, I can just surmise.

My advice to other organizations considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is to go for it, as it's a pretty stable product. On a scale of 1 to 10, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) overall around an 8.

My main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is server management and cloud operations.

I use RHEL for server management and cloud operations to perform multiple tasks, such as user access management, user management, patch management, and troubleshooting.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers multiple features that are really accessible and stable, providing security and compliance, hybrid cloud compatibility, enterprise-grade container support, task automation through cron jobs, and an overall good platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has positively impacted my organization through automation, as my recent task saved a lot of time by reducing the work from months to a day using scripts developed in RHEL, thus boosting our productivity and cutting costs while empowering a skilled workforce, enabling scalable and secure infrastructure, and fueling innovation and digital transformation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could be improved with a modernized knowledge base and documentation, better performance under high load, and possibly a reduction in the cost of the professional subscription. Apart from that, I don't see much need for improvement.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for more than five years.

In my experience, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is perfect in terms of stability.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) handles increases in users, applications, or data smoothly, which is why we use it for all our projects, as it provides us with confidence. We also use Amazon Linux, but primarily it is RHEL.

I have reached out to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) customer support multiple times, and I've found the experience amazing, as issues get resolved in a lesser time compared to Amazon AWS.

I have majorly worked on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) only and did not use a different solution before switching.

We have seen a return on investment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), having saved a lot of money and time due to the automation and scripting we perform, resulting in savings on man-hours as well.

I have mentioned earlier that the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could be reduced a bit, indicating a scope for improvement there.

Before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I evaluated other options like SUSE and AIX, but I don't think any of them are better than RHEL.

We do a lot of automation using Bash scripts. In a recent task, I had about 2,500 to 3,000 EBS volumes that I needed to change from GP2 to GP3 and calculate their throughput and IOPS, which would have been impossible manually due to time constraints, but we accomplished it with a Bash script thanks to RHEL. It's really very useful.

My advice for others looking into using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that everyone working on Linux should at least give it a try because it's a great platform.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an 8.5 out of 10.