What is our primary use case?
We use Red Hat for all sorts of use cases. This includes everything from running applications and databases, or the combination thereof, to building software for products that we use for embedded design.
My company has several RHEL implementations deployed in the field, including versions 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.
How has it helped my organization?
RHEL allows us to run multiple versions of the same application with no problem. We have specific databases and specific versions of them running for the support team, even though some of them are not in support. It has lots of features for things like containerization.
We use a fair bit of Red Hat including other products such as Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Insights, Red Hat Ansible, and Ansible Tower. We have also attempted to look at an OpenShift PoC. Red Hat seems to be doing a great job integrating their products. For instance, Satellite 7 will finally have all of the Puppet functionality Ansiblized. Overall, they're doing a great job integrating their stack to help make it better.
Having this integrated solution approach provides us with greater operational excellence because we can see what somebody is building. We have the environment captured and have visibility about what went into it for repeatability, reproducibility, scalability, and lots of other benefits.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable feature of RHEL is that it's well supported. It's a good Linux platform.
RHEL Smart Management gives you access to Satellite, which helps you do automated kickstart deployments. Satellite has a lot of control, giving you the ability to control content promotion, content YUM updates, caching, et cetera. You can have as much or as little overhead in compliance control as you want.
In terms of running and using applications, Red Hat is consistent regardless of the underlying infrastructure. It's implemented on VMware, Proxmox, KVM, and Hyper-V. Whatever underlying infrastructure you put it on, it's still Red Hat, which is great.
We use this product's built-in tracing and monitoring tools such as syslog and SAR (system activity reporter) to provide us with greater insight and visibility into what's going on.
What needs improvement?
I would like to see improvements made to the subscriptions and management of them.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since 2013.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Red Hat is a super stable operating system.
RHEL is reliable across environments including bare metal, virtualized, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud. I do not worry about things on Red Hat most of the time, at least not from an operating system perspective.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
This is a very scalable product.
From an administrative point of view, we have a team of 10 Linux admins but as far as consumers of the environment, we probably have between several hundred and 1,000 users. It is difficult to estimate precisely.
We have approximately 1,200 VMs with Red Hat Linux registered. We are going through divestitures so our company will be growing and shrinking our usage. We really don't know what next month will look like and whether these systems need to be replicated, duplicated, de-commissioned, et cetera.
I assume that in the future, we will maintain something close to 1,200 hosts.
How are customer service and support?
Red Hat support is great, and I would rate them an eight out of ten.
We have vendor support for our platform that we support internally. We don't often use Red Hat support but it's nice to know that they're there when and in case we need it. It's a good product, so we hardly ever actually have to open support tickets for Red Hat Linux, specifically.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We also use SUSE Linux and have some implementations that come packaged as an appliance from various vendors. We also have some Ubuntu requirements but those are not managed by the internal Linux operations team.
How was the initial setup?
The initial setup is straightforward. You start off by putting a disk in and specifying what partitions you want. Then, you can opt for a minimal OS or something with more features, such as a web server OS. Once you select what you need, it does some initial configuration and setup.
We always use a minimal configuration and build up from there. Our deployment process is a mix of legacy, where we do a manual install, versus a fully automated installation using Ansible.
For an end-to-end build, we normally take about 20 minutes. That's going from a bare minimum template to all of our security, InfoSec requirements, register to Satellite, register to Insights, etc.
In summary, the installation is as straightforward as it can be for Linux OS.
What about the implementation team?
We purchase our subscriptions directly from Red Hat and handle the deployment internally.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
This is not a cheap solution but it gets you the support if you ever need it. That said, it's nice to know that having Red Hat support is there but it's always stable so I hardly ever use it.
The single subscription and install repository for all types of systems makes it simple to purchase and install Red Hat. We had Red Hat x86 before this, and when we wanted to purchase the newer version, their system made it easy to complete the purchasing and installation processes.
There are a lot of other architectures available that we don't use, such as RSCT. They can be obtained from the repository but aren't applicable to us.
In addition to the standard licensing fees, we pay for Smart Management. This gets the Satellite and Insights features, which I recommend.
Overall, their subscription, process, and repository make for a streamlined purchase and installation process.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did not evaluate other options before choosing Red Hat. This has been the operating system in place since before I started with the company.
What other advice do I have?
One of the new features in RHEL version 8 is AppStream. We're still doing our RHEL 8 deployments and although we've started using AppStream, we haven't gotten very deep into it. Its use is on a very limited scope. RHEL 8 is about halfway through its lifecycle and we're still trying to see how it works.
When it comes to the deployment of cloud-based workloads, this solution helps to automate activities. We are just starting our cloud journey and as such, we currently don't have any cloud-based workloads. However, we plan to, and my understanding is that it will be much easier using Red Hat Gold images for Azure, AWS, etc.
My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to automate as much as possible. Overall, I think that this is a good product. I'm a pretty big proponent of Red Hat and in fact, as we speak, I'm wearing a Red Hat RHEL 8 shirt.
I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.
Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.