Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We have Ansible deployed on our Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. We use it to manage the security of our fleet of Ubuntu virtual machines.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is way ahead of Ubuntu in terms of security and compliance. It is mainly the ecosystem of data science tools that our developers want that pushes us in that direction. As a security engineer, I have a lot more peace at night knowing that my Red Hat servers are doing a good job keeping our Ansible infrastructure safe because that has fingers into everything we do. It is pretty critical.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not affected our system's uptime in any particularly noticeable way.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not enabled us to achieve security standards certification because we do not have any yet. We will have them hopefully in the future.

There are some nice integrations with scanning for vulnerabilities. That is the feature I have enjoyed the most because I am a security person, and that is my bread and butter.

Ansible has certainly been a game-changer. It is a lot easier to keep a whole bunch of virtual machines consistent with each other and make a change consistently across all of them. We use them for data science activities. Our data scientists are constantly trying out new packages and downloading new tools. We have to enable them to have root access on their machines but also need to ensure that they are not doing anything stupid at the same time. There are competitors to Ansible, but we are a big Python shop, so it is a very comfortable environment for us.

The only issue we have had with it is around the SELinux configuration because the way Ansible installs, it sticks the platform passwords in a flat file. We want that locked down more strongly than what is there currently with SELinux. 

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

I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

Primarily, we have used Ubuntu. We have had some of our use cases on CentOS, and then, of course, our workstations are all Windows, but I wish they were not.

We chose Ansible, and that chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for us.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud. We have Azure because it is the corporate standard. We do not have any concerns about using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud. Obviously, everything in the cloud is more exposed than everything on-prem, but it has got good, sensible, and secure defaults built in, so there are no concerns there.

In terms of Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades, when we upgraded Ansible this fall, that pushed us from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. It should be a little easier from now on. Now that we have made the big jump from the older Ansible to AAP, we will probably be upgrading the systems on a quarterly basis.

We probably have not yet seen an ROI. We purchased it a couple of years ago, but we have not had the time to put it to as much use as we wanted to put it to. The cost is low, so it would not take very long to reach a return on investment.

We have not made use of the Committed Spend.

For its use case, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.

The users utilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux for building, installing, and automating platforms. Additionally, we employ it as an installer for OpenShift clusters. Furthermore, there is a product called Red Hat High Availability Clustering and also JBoss. Occasionally, we also use it to build an Oracle RAC database.  

Red Hat Enterprise Linux simplifies risk reduction and compliance maintenance by utilizing bash scripts or Ansible to automate and streamline our tasks. Red Hat also offers a tool called Convert2RHEL, which simplifies the process of maintaining our products from Oracle, CentOS, and other vendors to Red Hat. This feature is truly remarkable.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is perfect for keeping our organization agile, especially when considering rootless containers or utilizing BotMan containers for enhanced security and performance. 

The Red Hat ecosystem enables the seamless integration of our products such as Ansible, Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat Satellite, and OpenShift platform to fulfill tasks, thereby enhancing the efficiency of our organization.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us reduce the time we spend on tedious tasks, and the large Red Hat community provides an easy way for us to maintain or fix errors and bugs. We were able to realize the benefits quickly.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables us to achieve security standard certification. I am a certified Red Hat System Administrator and Red Hat Engineer. The content of the certificate includes topics such as C Linux. This helps to make our organization more secure and stable and has an impact on our personnel sourcing.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux assists us in building with confidence and ensures availability across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. While there is a higher level of risk associated with using a public cloud for any product, private or virtualized environments offer greater security.

Red Hat Insights helps us prevent emergencies caused by security issues, noncompliant settings, and unpatched systems by enabling us to be more proactive in detecting and avoiding errors before they occur.

Red Hat Insights provides us with vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance, especially when we register our host directly with Red Hat. It works perfectly because it utilizes machine learning, allowing us to monitor our logs and prevent unnecessary downtime.

Errata is the most valuable feature, which is supported by Red Hat. Errata is a list of corrected errors appended to a document in Red Hat, used for provisioning or batching our hosts. Moreover, its stability and security are noteworthy.

Ever since Red Hat acquired CentOS, the connection between the new CentOS Upstream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become unstable and requires improvement.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's ability to run containerized applications is not optimized and has room for improvement.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for three years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extremely stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux can scale horizontally because it is in a virtualized environment. Vertical scaling depends on the deployment of the solution.

We have plans to increase our utilization of the solution.

The Red Hat technical support is excellent; critical issues are resolved promptly.

Positive

We also utilize other Linux operating systems depending on the use case. SUSE Linux Enterprise is more optimized for SAP products. When working with an Oracle database, it is preferable to use Oracle Linux.

The initial deployment was straightforward. The deployment time depends on two factors: the first factor is the infrastructure specs, and the second factor is what we are deploying with the operating system. For a minimal server, deployment takes five minutes. For a server with a graphical user interface, it can take up to 20 minutes.

The implementations are all completed in-house.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is deployed in multiple environments, including pre-production, user acceptance testing, and system integration testing. Our Red Hat team, the development team, and another team utilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux within our organization.

Each processor architecture has a distinct version of the software.

The Red Hat exams are not solely based on security but also on performance. It is a challenging skill to grasp, but once learned, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be flawless.

I highly recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux, particularly for production environments, due to its stability and enhanced security features.

The most valuable lesson I have learned using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that the entire Red Hat ecosystem is perfect. All the open-source projects can work together, especially for DevOps or when implementing valid automation or containerized applications. If we need to deploy a centralized application, we will use OpenShift. And if we want to perform tasks on OpenShift, we will use Ansible as an automation platform. If we want to upgrade or manage our environment hosts in batches, we will use Red Hat Satellite. If we have applications and want to create an environment for them, we will use Red Hat JBoss. If we want to run high-availability clusters or high-performance computing clusters, we will turn to Red Hat High Availability Clustering. Working within the Red Hat ecosystem is perfect.

We run IT and telco workloads and applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helped us centralize development. We use a complete ecosystem of Red Hat for end-to-end development, deployment, and operations. 

Centralizing development is achieved as we have clearly defined platforms to host applications, like OpenShift. 

Additionally, the ACS on top of containers scans to ensure they are compliant, reducing vulnerabilities within our software.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a standardized environment with Kubernetes and good support behind it. The end-to-end delivery for developing, testing, and deploying containers in the same ecosystem is a very valuable feature. 

The built-in security features are fine, we don't receive complaints about them.

One area for improvement is dealing with specifics developed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux that are now end of life. We have to remediate these changes, which is a disadvantage. 

Additionally, better comparisons between different stack providers in pricing and functionalities could help, especially since public clouds often appear less expensive during planning but are more costly in practice.

I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux personally since joining my company ten years ago. Within the company, it has been used for more than 20 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux performs quite well for business-critical applications. Although we have some outages, it's not unusual, and I cannot blame RHEL entirely for it.

Scaling Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS is smooth and without complaints. We are planning to widen its use by moving from OpenStack to bare metal according to Red Hat's roadmap.

The customer service rating varies at around an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

They conducted tests with Ubuntu. That said, it was less expensive and not as stable or developed as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

There is a return on investment since we can host our applications on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quite expensive, yet the technical support, available roadmaps, and services justify the cost. We receive value for the price we pay, including technical support, which enables business continuity and compliance.

We evaluated Ubuntu, but it was less stable.

I would advise trying it out to see for yourself. Red Hat provides great technical support. That said, the pricing may need careful evaluation, especially when comparing with public cloud offerings.

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

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for file transfers and changing file permissions. It is also used to check file spaces and for migration purposes. Our tools are hosted on the Linux environment, and our agent services run on it.

We use Red Hat Linux to start and stop our agent services during migration, install new agents, and transfer files. The primary benefit is that it's a widely used open-source solution with good support. Now that we've migrated from CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we will realize some benefits. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has more features. 

I like Red Hat Enterprise Linux's clustering capabilities and high-level architecture. It has high availability, built-in disaster recovery, SSH features, and scripting. 

The documentation is excellent. Since it was acquired by IBM, the open-source tools and technologies hosted on the Linux environment have been updated with many new features. 

It would be great if Red Hat had its cloud instead of using AWS, Azure, or GCP. Red Hat Enterprise Linux should have a dedicated cloud. I would also like to see more Windows support. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux could also be more user-friendly and use AI or machine learning to automate processes. That is the most dynamic feature in the information technology industry.

I have used Red Hat for five years.

We have intermittent issues with stability, but we're hoping they will improve in the latest version.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quite scalable. We can place a lot of agents on Linux servers, some on the cloud, and a few on-prem. It can handle the workload. 

I rate Red Hat support eight out of 10. We have communicated with Red Hat support via email. 

Positive

Before Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we used CentOS. Another Linux flavor I've used is Ubuntu. 

The first deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux had a learning curve, but I've learned a lot since then. Once you know the process, then it's straightforward. It uses a command-based process, but if it were based on a GUI or a console, like a Windows installer, that would be a significant improvement. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux requires some housekeeping. We have to restart and patch servers weekly or biweekly and check the CPU, memory size, file size, the database used, and whether the IP network protocols are defined. All this happens monthly, weekly, or fortnightly.

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight out of 10. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run Oracle Databases for CC&B and JDM. All the RHEL stuff is on-prem. The CC&B team manages the customer care and billing stuff, but we take care of the operating systems, and the application users manage the applications. We have 200 to 300 users on RHEL. 

We are missing random devices for patching and everything, and we don't have the Linux data license for that. If we had that, life would be much easier. Right now, we patch using Yum updates and we manually do configuration changes from our end.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux improves our security. On our end, we only use the console to reboot the server and apply security. We patch it completely if we have any security updates. Every quarter, we run a report using quality and whatever it was pulling. That's what we are patching. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes patching and scripting much easier, and it provides all the features I need for patching and VM updates. It's easy to apply Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features when it comes to simplifying risk reduction or maintaining compliance.

For phone support, we had to buy a license for all our servers, and it was a bit pricey for us. 

I have used RHEL for 21 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is highly stable. We've never had any problems or crashes. It's very smooth from our end.

It's easy to scale Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Right now, we're discussing what will happen a year from now, when we plan to increase our usage. 

I rate Red Hat customer service eight out of 10. Their knowledge base is fantastic. You can easily find whatever you need. Their support responds immediately, whereas we struggled with support from Oracle. 

We were using Oracle Linux, and I don't see much difference except the support. We were not getting good support from Oracle because it took too long whenever we opened a ticket. Oracle was also too expensive, and patching is much easier with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We were not looking for more features. Oracle Linux has a lot more packages than we need.

Setting up Red Hat Enterprise Linux was straightforward. You need at least two system admins to do so. Migrations and upgrades are also easy. Our main products are CC&B and JDM, with an Oracle database on the back end. We were highly satisfied with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for migrating all of those. We also have other solutions like SQL Server, which is on the Windows operating system.

Performance-wise, this Linux is better because you can ignore some packages if you don't need them. 

Oracle Linux is free, but we were having many other issues with it.

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux nine out of 10. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very easy to install and manage. 

We are currently in the midst of a POC phase with a standalone cluster. This cluster consists of both coordinator and worker nodes, with a metadata store for storing various metadata. The entire setup is deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, and we have established a connection to the OpenShift UI.

While using it, we encountered far fewer complexities, and the entire process is much smoother and streamlined. For patching purposes, we simply need to communicate with our system administrator. They take care of the patching process, so we don't have to get involved and we can easily connect to the artifact repository and download the necessary artifacts to install in our system. 

We have a set of JSON files containing YAML configurations where all the required image details are documented and this setup makes it very straightforward for us.As for the Web Console, if you're talking about the user interface for tasks like creating ports, deploying applications, managing secrets, and other functions, I haven't encountered any significant issues. 

The process is generally straightforward and quick, taking just a few minutes. OpenShift offers two types of interfaces: one where you can edit YAML files for more advanced customization, and the other where you can use forms for faster deployment, though with fewer features.

Continuous improvement is essential to enhance user experiences and address evolving needs.

I have been working with it for approximately six months.

Our experience with its customer support is very good. Whenever we encounter any issues, we receive prompt and comprehensive assistance. There's no need to wait or take any additional steps to get the help we require, which is highly appreciated. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Positive

In the past, our work primarily involved Hadoop, and we also dealt with Solid Cloud for security and other purposes, but we found that this setup was slow and not open source. On the other hand, the DLP solution we're currently using is not only cost-effective but also significantly faster. 

I also used a Linux browser, specifically the KCL browser which required me to go through the process of installing packages and various components, while in the current setup, everything is seamlessly connected. We simply use the OC command with a private key to connect to OpenShift. There are no extra or additional steps required, making the whole process exceptionally fast and efficient. It's quite remarkable and makes the workflow truly hassle-free.

The initial setup was easy.

The deployment process is straightforward. I simply had to deploy the images using OC commands, and the process of connecting to OpenShift was remarkably fast and smooth.

Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

The SAP solution subscriptions have made things a lot easier because it's a standard build. 

The solutions were premium and standard, which were not the same. They've combined those into just one standard version. Only the support hours are different. That is fantastic for us. It makes life easier.

For the standard subscriptions, in the past, updating the OS could increase your downtime. With the production ones, it did not. It got our non-production and production out of sync. Now, they've combined that all into one. It's just the support hours that are different. They're fantastic.

We use the SAP solution subscriptions only for SAP, which are great. 

We also use Ansible. Ansible is a wonderful tool for automation. We use it to automate our patching. We use Ansible to get playbooks to take care of anything that's manual.

We were able to achieve our security standard certifications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has affected our HA systems in a negative way. We're working through some of those issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 came up with a new feature that's like a MOM API in our cluster. It goes out into the AWS side and it needs to be adjusted. It does a retry that causes a cluster to failover pretty quickly, so we turned that feature off. That's something that could be improved. 

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a long time. It has been at least 10 to 15 years.

Support has been great. We get the right people for what we need.

Positive

The patching has been good, but we scan with Qualys all the time. It comes up with thousands of EIDs all the time, but putting on the patches seems to resolve that.

We're operating right now from 7.9 to 8.6. We have to go with the supported versions. We did qualify for RHEL 9. 

We used Unix in the past. We did have to come up with the SAP side. It was always Unix.

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use it for databases and applications. In the new model, we keep databases separate from applications. Currently, about 90% of our operations are running in Red Hat 8. Some systems are still on Red Hat 7, but those will be migrated off by the beginning of next year.

It's been great since we have it. It's been reliable and fast. We keep all the security agents, and we've been taken care of right away, and that's the improvement in our company. It's with the new RHEL. There's always something new, something good that works for us. 

Moreover, we might need to move workloads from the cloud in the US to China in the future.

As we're migrating and doing the Elite upgrade, which is an in-place upgrade, we find it great. We use it for databases, and we're testing it for applications. Some applications don't work, but some are functioning well. So far, it's been a positive experience.

Since I'm more focused on migrating, Leapp is awesome. We are able to do something that will work the way it's working.  There are no issues or breaks.

RHEL's knowledge base is great. It's very good. Especially when you try to open a case, it gives you all the options you need, so you don't have to wait for the case to be opened. You can get all the information you need right there.

Moreover, I am in the process of testing Leapp and Red Hat Insights. And then create our images from there rather than create MIs.

At the new company, we've been using it for three years. At my previous company,  we used it for over five years. Personally, I have been using it for almost eight to ten years.

We often have to go through people who have the same labels as us and who have the same knowledge base articles as us, which takes time. But they do it first; it's searching the knowledge way that I search. That I can do. That takes the time before. They do the payment. They sent me exactly what I had already found. And then we can go to the next level. That is taking a little bit more time that we can be a little bit better. So, the initial step of the support process could be improved. 

90% of people who open those bases are administrators who already look on the Internet for all these knowledge bases. So by the time we get there, we're gonna get the knowledge base back. And that's not helpful. 

Positive

I used to use HPUX and Solaris. We switched to RHEL because HPUX started looking like it was going away, so we started moving to Red Hat. We thought it was our best option. We tested different flavors of RHEL.

When it comes to provisioning and patching, we have a satellite server. We use a lot of Ansible. We are getting used to Ansible and Satellite servers. 

The initial setup wasn't complex, but since we wanted to make it easier to use, it became harder to make it work the way we wanted. Not out of the box, so we can just build a server that is ready to be deployed right away without any more interventions.

We use RHEL with AWS because it's easier for us to maintain since we create our own AMIs and we update that as we need it. So we don't need to follow their schedule until we get it more secure and more reliable for us.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.