Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Ansible, network monitoring systems, and similar applications.

We implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is widely used in our region and offers excellent support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled partial centralization of our development processes.

It performs well for our business-critical applications and has robust built-in security features.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has contributed to business continuity and compliance efforts.

The built-in security features are quite good.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has ongoing potential for improved integration with hosting solutions and VPNs as the demand for these technologies grows.

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

The support has a good community. It's easy to find almost every resource needed.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that it's Linux. I've lived so long with Red Hat Linux, so it has always had a good history.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight out of ten.

When considering a third-party Linux OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a strong option due to its excellent support and robust ecosystem.

I'm using the Red Hat Platform with Open Stack and an RHEL product for storage. The use case is performance IOPS for Ceph Storage, which depends on a bare-metal RHEL server. 

For my security customer, we get greater than 90 percent uptime. RHEL helped us achieve security certification. It helped my end-user pass their security assessment. RHEL's built-in security features scan the third-party layer in the OpenStack and RHEL platform to assess the SSH and firewall security or patch updates from the RHEL platform and reset OpenStack. Security is the number one priority for my end user. They want to prevent hacker access from the outside. 

RHEL supports the hybrid cloud strategy. The goal of using a bare metal server has been to improve availability and database performance. The OpenStack platform uses network capability to improve database performance.

RHEL improves database and application performance for my end users. The application can collect regional and national data for my end user, a strategic customer in Indonesia.

I am confident in the managed services RHEL provides in terms of the OpenStack, Ceph Storage, and OpenShift container-based products. If there are any problems with the RHEL platform, Open Stack, Ceph Storage, etc., I can raise the issue to RHEL global support. 

For the past twenty or thirty years, Red Hat has reengineered its product from bare-metal on-prem to the cloud environment. Migrating an RHEL system from bare metal to cloud is somewhat difficult. They could add a fast boot. 

We deployed one side of RHEL in 2023, and we'll deploy the other side in 2025.

When I deploy RHEL for the first time, I try to learn about the performance and tune the performance. 

Scalability isn't an issue. Our customers haven't reported any performance problems from scaling up.

I rate Red Hat support eight out of 10. I have used Red Hat support since 2023. They escalate the ticket based on severity, and if they can't resolve the issue within the maintenance window, they will pass me to another engineer. 

Positive

We previously worked with Oracle Linux. My customer has two divisions. The network decision is focused on accounting database performance, while the IT division uses Oracle Linux. On the network side, the customer uses RHEL products like OpenStack, Ceph Storage, and OpenShift. 

My end user wanted to upgrade from RHEL OpenStack 16.1 to the latest 17.1.3 in April 2024. We also upgraded Ceph Storage and OpenShift. Now, my customer wants a testbed before upgrading to the RHEL version in live production. If there are problems, we open a ticket with global support and or two people will join our remote call. We have it deployed in Jakarta and plan to deploy it to Bandung.

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight out of 10. I recommend all the Red Hat products, including OpenShift and Ceph Storage. OpenShift Container is a mature product for RHEL portal customers.

We have a database that we maintain for root passwords, and sometimes I need to break the root password to reset it. We work a lot on logical volumes where I need to grow and shrink volumes on the fly. I did not have to shrink the logical volumes much, but I worked a lot on growing logical volumes on the fly to make them available for the database team. I have done network-related things. I configured network multipathing or IP multipathing where we can parallelly route the traffic to multiple ethernets.

I work a lot on user-related issues as well. We are also using Ansible a lot for automation. I am writing some playbooks, so there are a lot of use cases.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us a lot. We host a lot of our applications on the Red Hat platform. We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for both on-prem and VM platforms. Most of them are VMs, but we do have some old legacy systems where we have Linux running on some Dell architecture. Our goal is to get rid of them this year and implement everything on virtualization because virtualization is growing a lot.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development. We are using it in the production and lower environments. We are using a common platform for our deployments. We have a centralized environment.

In terms of portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for keeping our organization agile, it is flexible. Agile methodologies are very popular nowadays, and they help with coordination between dev and production teams. It is fulfilling the gaps between these teams. It is helpful.

I see so many features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux that I do not see in other Linux operating systems, such as Ubuntu. That is why Red Hat is very popular. All my experience is mostly on the Red Hat side. In terms of features, I like breaking root passwords, and I like the XFS file system over ext4.

I have not used it on the cloud side. I have not heard much about how Red Hat is doing on the cloud side. In the market, AWS and Azure are very popular, and they have captured most of the market. If Red Hat can improve on the cloud side, they can retain their customer base. Their customers do not need to go out for other cloud resources, and they can use the Red Hat cloud.

We are using it on-prem and in the virtual environment on VMware. We are using a cloud, but it is not a Red Hat cloud. We are using AWS in our organization. We have some EC2 instances deployed with Red Hat Enterprise Linux images, but I cannot say it is a Red Hat cloud. It is an AWS cloud, and we have instances. We are depending on a third-party cloud. If Red Hat provides that kind of service to our company, we can retain Red Hat. We do not need to go for a public cloud.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for almost 12 years. I started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

It is a stable platform, but our company still wants to stick to the older version. They do not want to change the application base. They do not want to take risks. Unfortunately, Red Hat is not able to help to provide the patches for older versions. They suggest upgrading, but management is not doing that, so the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side is good, but our management side is bad.

Its scalability is good. We plan to use it more. We are growing. As our infrastructure grows, we are buying more licenses.

Their customer service is excellent. I like it. I am in touch with Ed who is one of the support engineers with Red Hat. He is helping me. 

I am also in touch with a few other people at Red Hat. If I run into any issues, I can simply email them, and I get a quick response from them. Based on the support I am receiving, I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We did not use any similar solution previously.

We are using it on-prem and in the virtual environment on VMware. Our cloud provider is AWS.

We are using the CI/CD model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are using blue/green deployments as well for our containerized applications, and we have some canary deployments.

My initial deployment experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux was not great. It was not as easy as the current version. It was difficult during those days. We had to load the GUI and then change to CLI. It is better now. Red Hat has made some improvements in the newer versions. The current version 9 looks better than any other previous version.

I did not use any integrator or consultant. I downloaded an ISO image from Red Hat. I downloaded and installed it myself, and it worked very well. I did not run into any issues with the installation process.

Over the last few years, we have been within budget. We do not have any constraints about Red Hat. We are a big organization. We use a lot of products from different vendors. We are working on cost optimization for some of the vendors but not Red Hat, so Red Hat is still good. We are still happy with it.

The biggest return on investment is the customer base. We are in the telecom industry. We try to get as many customers as we can. Red Hat is not the only product that we are using, but it is a major product that we are using in our company.

We are good as of now. We do not have any concerns about licensing. Its price is still good for us.

We are not using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. We are using Kubernetes and Dockers for that.

When it comes to patching, our goal for 2024 is to make all the systems compliant. Especially at the infrastructure and application levels, I am actively working on the compliance tasks, and our goal is to fix all vulnerabilities. I am working with someone at Red Hat on some issues because I am not able to find the exact patch for certain vulnerabilities.

For now, we are happy with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are happy with what we are getting.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten. The reason for reducing two points is that I have not explored other operating systems very well.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for just about everything in my company. Our use cases stem from three-tier applications up through cloud deployments, Kubernetes, containers, etc. Prior to this, I worked in an enterprise as a Linux engineer.

Being able to onboard faster is definitely an advantage to other Linux systems. In the enterprise, we had an onshore and offshore model. Our offshore model was hard to get onboarded into Linux, even if they said they had Linux experience. There is a big difference between managing one or two systems in your basement to managing a fleet of Linux systems, and that does not always translate over. Having a Linux system that has a cockpit with it where you can give someone a GUI, even though the engineers do not really use it, helps onboard new people into the enterprise, into their jobs, and into their roles a lot faster.

We have a lot of really smart people. They are constantly figuring out ways to do things better and faster with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The openness of it and the ability to create whatever we want to create or have to create to make our actual job easier has given our operations people more time to focus on the things they need to focus on, and not the nitty-gritty of the operating system. Tuning becomes super easy. It is scriptable. It is easy to automate. That gives them all the time back in their day to be able to go solve cool problems and not infrastructure problems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development. All of our developers get their own developer environment, and that is all based on containers and some version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It depends on what they are at and what they are doing. So, we build and give it to them. They are up and running, and they just go. We have some legacy guys who are still helping our customers with older versions. Those people exist. I talked to someone earlier who still has a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 deployment out there.

When it comes to security and compliance, I like firewalld to do things at the host level and to complement what we are doing out in the enterprise with next-gen firewalls and things like that. I have had SELinux enabled on my systems and in my enterprises since it was available. It was a little bit of a learning curve, but it has helped to keep our systems as secure as possible. It complements well with what security groups are doing for the rest of the enterprise.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is great for keeping our organization agile. It is fantastic. We can run them on-prem. We can run them in the cloud. We can move them wherever we need them at the time. If something has to go to the edge for any reason, such as a bandwidth issue or an on-prem issue in the data center, we can push those workloads out. We could push all those containers to where they need to run and when we need to run them. It is super easy to do.

I have not used Red Hat Insights for long, but when I was a Red Hat Insights user, it was the first place I stopped to see what was going on and be able to quickly address and fix issues that Red Hat Insights found.

Red Hat Insights provided us with vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance. In terms of their effect on our uptime, we were able to plan our maintenance windows around what we were seeing in Red Hat Insights. We had the visibility and the ability to go in and plan things out. We could plan what needs to be done and then make that change and say, "This is what we are doing. Here is the playbook for it. We are going to run this in tonight's maintenance window." That prevented us from having to take machines down during the day because we found something critical at that time.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux that are most valuable to me, both in the enterprise and now as a partner, are the enterprise features. We are able to have a Linux system that is open-source and that allows us to do domain trust IBM and all that fun stuff. We have a good solid enterprise Linux.

It is not broken. Linux is Linux. It has been since Torvalds created the kernel back in version one of the kernel. We have added more features. More things have come to Linux and kernel. All the AI stuff is a bunch of buzzwords. In the keynote today at the Red Hat summit, Chris Wright talked about lightspeed coming to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. What do we need that for? What are we doing with AI? Just the stability of it is fine. If anything cool comes out, I will be the first to check it out. It is a stable platform. It is a workhorse, and that is how we use it.

However, there should be training materials for new enterprises that do not cost an arm and a leg. Red Hat training is phenomenal, but it is expensive. There has to be a better way to onboard new engineers into Linux to really and truly compete with Microsoft. Microsoft is just easy. Everyone uses it. You have to use it in school, and you have to use it everywhere. From an onboarding perspective, we can improve and have an affordable training solution for someone who might not want to be an RHCE or an RHCA but still needs to do their job. It is not Linux's fault. It is what it is. It is a workhorse. It does its thing, but we can do better to enable customers to utilize Linux better.

I have been using it since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. It has been about 20 years.

It is super stable. When Red Hat comes out with lightspeed or integrates SELinux, there are no huge rollbacks. Once it makes it downstream in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you know that is going to work. Everything has bugs, and we get that, but we know it is going to work. We know that nothing terrible is going to happen to our production environment, so stability is fantastic.

We can roll out more machines if we need more machines. We pull machines back if we do not need them anymore. One of the things that is lacking is that currently, there is no way to have ephemeral Linux instances for compliance month or your audit month. If you have to bring up a hundred machines, you have to pay for that upfront. That might be changing now, but in terms of scalability, that is a detriment to how smaller organizations can operate. Not everyone can absorb that cost. It is very scalable, but the pricing is a little prohibitive for scalability.

Their support is awesome. Their TAMs are awesome. The technical support that you get is awesome. There is the ability to attach yourself to bigger customers. When you are a small enterprise and you have an issue, you sometimes filter to the bottom of that list because there are other way-bigger customers who are way louder than some of the smaller ones. Being able to talk to your team and ask how to get a problem fixed is phenomenal. They are able to look at the backend and go, "Oh, there is a large telco that is having the same problem. I am going to add you to that one." From a customer service standpoint and tech support specifically, engineering has been fantastic.

The ability to talk to the people out in the community who work for Red Hat and maintain all of that, from the open-source side and the closed-source side, is amazing. A lot of people do not realize that they can jump on Slack or other platforms, and they can talk to the guys who are responsible for it and figure out what is going on. Sometimes, they ask to open a case, and other times, they say that they know and they are fixing it. Having that accessibility is amazing. You cannot call Microsoft and ask them to let you talk to the engineer who made X, Y, or Z.

Positive

I have been using Red Hat for 25 years.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux everywhere. We are using it on-prem. We call it the fourth cloud, so we have our own cloud like every enterprise does. They might realize that or not. We are using it everywhere. We have it at the edge, in the cloud, on-prem, and hybrid. It is the whole nine yards.

Our deployment strategy is to make it work and get it out there fast. We use all three cloud providers: GCP, Azure, and AWS.

Its deployment is super easy. Once you know what you need, rolling out Red Hat Enterprise Linux is super simple. You just go and repeat until you need to change something and then you change it.

We are using OpenShift to deploy Linux containers for a virtualization competitor migration. We are using it to migrate workloads from that vendor to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so we have Linux running in containers to do their virtualization. We are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux containers as well for some workloads, but for the bootable container aspects of it, we essentially have a VM. This is how we use it there, and then everything else is pure containerization. It is not Red Hat Enterprise Linux-specific.

We take care of the deployment for customers. 

When I was in the enterprise, we did not take external help. We did all of that in-house.

We have seen an ROI but not specifically with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the workhorse. Everything else that supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux is where you get your ROI. When you take Ansible, you start automating all of your configurations. You take Insights, and you are getting those playbooks to remediate security issues and all that fun stuff. That is where you get a return on your investment. That is where you see your engineering dollars go down and they can focus on other aspects of the business. That is not specific to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is the whole ecosystem.

I have had sales folks who have been transparent with the pricing, and then I have had other ones who were not as great. Most of those ones that were not as great are not working for Red Hat anymore.

From a pricing perspective, there is supportability. What you get with that support is the ability to open a case before you do something. You can tell them that you are going to be upgrading your Satellite system or all Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems and that you need a case open. They open a case, and then when the day comes, they are there. They are ready, and they know what is going on. The price point for that is phenomenal because you are paying for support. From a pricing perspective, it is on point. It is definitely a value-add, and it is extremely transparent from a customer standpoint.

I have evaluated other solutions. Manageability is the main difference. I have successfully ripped out other solutions in enterprises that I went to and replaced them with Red Hat. They had large fleets and no centralized management. When you come to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you have the Red Hat Satellite server. You have Red Hat Insights. You have all of those things that help you manage large fleets and a large number of Linux machines. When you evaluate other solutions, they have some centralized management now, but that was not common previously. It is kind of a hodgepodge. They are stitched together with all these other solutions, but it does not make sense. In one case, they jammed Linux into their management platform used to manage databases, and it did not work. How do you manage a thousand machines on some busted piece of management software?

If a colleague is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they should go for something based on the use case. They have to look at what they are trying to do and what they want to do. They can get away with Fedora, for instance, but the question for me always comes down to supportability. Do they want to be able to call someone and say, "This is broken. Help. Hurry," or do they have the skills in-house to do that? Most companies do not have those skills. They have one or two very good engineers, but they cannot fix everything at the same time. If they want portability, then they should not look somewhere else. They should go to Red Hat Enterprise Linux because they have the Red Hat name behind it.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten. There is always room for improvement in a product. Tens are unicorns. No one gets a ten. Maybe if Jesus made an operating system, he would get a ten.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is just a piece of an operating system for my company, and what we need the most is STIG compliance because we have a lot of different customers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped my company since, with it, we have gotten more customers. Now, our company can say upfront that we use Red Hat and are STIG compliant while also being security-focused, which really helps open up the door to people who want to get their stuff done.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its good integration with Ansible.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not helped centralize development in our company, especially since we deal with unique use cases in our organization. My company still develops locally on CentOS, but once our company actually completes the product for our customer, it gets shipped somewhere else and we can't centralize things since we don't have that much time to spare owing to which we stay disconnected after the aforementioned process.

My company plans to use the product for containerization projects, especially since we are in the process of converting to Kubernetes.

Based on my assessment of the the built-in security features when it comes to areas like risk reduction, business continuity, and compliance, I would say that I am a big fan of the tool.

In terms of the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to keep our organization agile, it has been pretty good since all the containers have been very portable without having to deal with any environmental issues.

If I had to give a suggestion to a colleague who is looking at open-source cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I would say that one should look at AlmaLinux since it is the closest thing one can get to Red Hat.

The product's deployment model is usually in a single data center, and it consists of one machine at a time. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) does not use a public cloud.

The documentation is an area of concern where improvements are required. Sometimes, I go to look at stuff in the tool's documentation to see how to configure something, and it doesn't make any sense. The tool's documentation is written by someone who already knows how it works for those who need to learn how it works. Everything else in the documentation is really good, though. I would describe the documentation as a kind of a hit or miss.

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

It is a scalable solution.

I would like to expand the use of the product in the future, but our company's business model is contract-based and very slow, which makes it difficult to work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

As per my evaluation of the technical support offered by the product, I would consider the support services offered to be at a 50-50 rate since everything really depends on who you get to talk to from the support team. Some of the people from the product's support team to whom we reached out didn't understand our use cases or our problems, so they couldn't help us at all. Some of the support staff members who understood what our company meant when it came to the issues associated with the product were able to help us in 30 seconds. My colleagues who contacted the product's support team were satisfied with the technical team's services. I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

Neutral

In my company, we used to use CentOS. Now that CentOS has reached the end of life phase, it doesn't meet our company's needs, so we transitioned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Previously in my company, we used to use CentOS. CentOS will reach the end of life phase in the upcoming month, which is the reason why my company had to choose another product like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The solution is used on an on-premises model.

Deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was surprisingly easy. The installers were the same as the ones used for other solutions.

My company did not have a strategy to deploy the product since we just needed Red Hat to hurry up, put it on a box, and figure it out.

My company did not seek the help of a third party to help us with the product's deployment phase.

The biggest ROI I have experienced from the use of the solution revolves around the area of customer satisfaction. My company's customers who use the product have a lot less to be changed in the product and it has helped save a lot of development and redevelopment time for our organization.

The cost and setup are not areas that are transparent for me. The tool's licensing part has been a real pain because when our company sells a system to a customer, they take full control of it in their data center, and we are not allowed to access it, even though they bought it from us. The license transfer has always been really awkward because our company initially had the license until our customers tested it and accepted the product. I was hoping to find somebody to talk to about the license transfer part with Red Hat products, but I don't know where to find someone associated with the solution.

My company briefly evaluated a product named Debian, but after that, our company's customers specifically asked us to go for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Considering that the licensing part associated with the product is a pain, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

My company currently uses Red Hat Virtualization to host all our virtual machines, and then we install Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for almost everything we do. My company only has 30 or 40 Windows Servers, while we have over 2,000 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) machines. In my company, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for everything from provisioning systems to Speedtest Servers to whatever we need in the company.

I would like to say Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is much more efficient than Windows, and my employees love the Linux command line. All in all, Linux is what my company has been using since the beginning, so it is imprinted in everyone working in the technology section of our organization.

All Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) features have been valuable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a Linux system, and in our company, we could probably use different Linux systems. My company mainly uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because of the kind of security and the patching delivered, including the backporting of patches, instead of actually having to do version upgrades. The product's valuable features include stability and security.

In my company, the solution has helped centralize development in most parts.

The use of the product for containerization projects is an area that my company has been dealing with lately. In our company, we are installing a lot of OpenShift clusters now and moving that way, but if they run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or bare-bones or bare-metal OpenShift, the shift needs to be made.

In terms of the impact my company has experienced after making Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a part of our containerization projects, I would say that a different team is handling the development parts for our company. Our company would be happy if the products we use were Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or OpenShift. My company is very interested in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), even if it will take many years for us to be completely over containers.

As per my assessment of the tool's built-in security features when it comes to areas like risk reduction, business continuity, and compliance, all of the aforementioned functionalities are the main reasons my company stayed with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). My company prefers Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because of its stability, patch management, and other features that make us feel more secure.

In terms of the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to keep our organization agile, I would say that my company has done a lot of automation, which helps us keep everything as flexible as we want. One of my team members told me that the product is super when it comes to everything related to automation. The tool allows you to be kind of flexible.

At the moment, I don't use Red Hat Insights even though we have looked at it in our company. In our company, we have put up Red Hat Insights, and we have it on the machines, but it's not that deep in use yet. I believe that Red Hat Insights will be more and more important since the security team wants to use it to get a better overview.

If I have to speak to a colleague who is looking at open-source cloud-based operating systems for Linux, I would say that everyone needs to make a choice when it is not something concerning our company since we are standardized with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Red Hat products in our company. My colleagues will have to use Red Hat products if they work in my company.

Speaking of whether the Red Hat portfolio has affected our total cost of ownership across our enterprise landscape, I would say that we have been using virtualization in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for many years, and it has been a very good and cost-effective tool for our company. The product may reach the end of the life phase soon, so we have to migrate to some other solution, though we know that the prices may go up whenever we do it. Up until now, the tool has been very good.

My company deploys Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from Red Hat Satellite. Red Hat CloudForm is a self-service portal we use in our company but now it is an IBM product. I don't remember the name as it is long and boring. Red Hat CloudForm is a self-service portal that is connected to Red Hat Satellite to provision the machines.

My manager role is the reason why I am not that deep into the technical part anymore. In my company, the IT team is happy with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since they don't have to use Windows.

Personally, I started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) around ten years ago. In my company, I have been using the tool for twenty years.

It is a stable solution.

The solution scales up perfectly fine, especially since everything is automated since we have a very small team of 10 people in our company managing everything, including 2,000 servers.

The product's support team was good whenever my company needed support services. Our company also uses some professional services from time to time, especially since Red Hat has a deep knowledge of the tool. If our company faces a problem, we have a very good connection with the tool's team in Norway, and they always help us, even if it's time-critical. The tool's support team manages to get us the consultants our company needs. I rate the technical support a ten out of ten.

Positive

My company has been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from the beginning.

When I started in the company almost ten years ago, deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was done with an ISO image, which you mount it up, and you put in the IP addresses and do a lot of manual things. It is a different story today since you just enter how many courses you want and how much disk you want, and the deployment is done in two minutes.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model, and we don't have a lot in the cloud at the moment in our company. As an ISP, the services we deliver are kind of time-sensitive or latency-sensitive, so as long as we have a data center, it doesn't make that much sense to put stuff in the cloud just because it is the best.

In terms of the prices and license of the product, I feel the solution has been good so far, especially since it has been quite easy to understand compared to a lot of other tools. I have been working with IBM and other vendors, where I have seen how other tools might have a bit more difficult pricing or licensing models compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). In terms of pricing, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been quite okay in general.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was present ten years ago before I joined my current company, so I don't know if any other products were evaluated against it before my joining.

We have a few applications that we have started developing in the cloud now managed by a different team, but I don't think they use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) specifically.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

We first used it for application installation to run applications on Windows. We had it running on Windows. We then upgraded it. It was still on the IBM platform, but it was still x86. We have now updated it, and it is now running on IBM Linux Z.

We use it for Internet banking, core banking applications, and other peripheral applications.

It has helped with consolidation. When we first started to do clusters, we were using Oracle cluster and Red Hat cluster. The Red Hat cluster was more stable than the Oracle cluster, so we had to uninstall the Oracle cluster and just use the Red Hat feature to have floating IP addresses between two cluster nodes. Having it in a cluster was the single most useful application of Red Hat in the environment.

We use Red Hat Insights, Ansible, and Satellite. Red Hat Insights is helping us big time. A year ago, I was looking at bolstering my team to about five or so administrators. With Red Hat Insights and other tools, I am satisfied with just two administrators. They are there just to manage the system and not necessarily go down into the trenches.

It seems that Red Hat Insights provides vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance, but my team would know that better. I manage a team that does that.

Its stability is most valuable. Its administrative aspect is also good. It is relatively easy to administer. I am familiar with AIX. AIX is super easy. I did not have to struggle much to adapt to Red Hat.

They can make the extended file system dynamic. Currently, we have to bring down the server to add an Hdisk. We cannot extend the database on the fly. We have to have downtime. We want to ensure that we make the blackout periods as minimal as possible. Currently, there is a gap in the file system management. I want to be able to expand the file system in a simpler way and have the application or the database use that expansion without any downtime.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2004. It has been 20 years.

There is no problem with stability. It is stable. We have a couple of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 still running. We also have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 systems. The hardware is functional, but the application was retired. We cannot get an update for it. It has been running since 2008.

Its scalability is fine. There is no problem with scalability. We can do it in real-time. Now with containers and other things, we can scale on the fly without much downtime. We can build a small system and scale it. We can start at a much lower level than several others.

It has improved tremendously. I remember when it used to be centralized. I have been to North Carolina to get training, but now they can come to us for the training. The whole support architecture has improved. We can reserve hours for calls when the need arises. If we do not use it, it is reallocated the next month to some other project. They are doing well. I am impressed.

Positive

We were using and still are using AIX, but most of the applications have been imported, so we are between AIX and Red Hat. We are also using Windows, but Red Hat has stood out. It is not yet there with AIX, but it is getting there.

We were using Ubuntu and a few other flavors, but they were not organized. They were still too open. The support and the training for Red Hat Enterprise Linux was spot on. It was exemplary. We could find support easily.

We have them in clusters, and we also have standalone ones. We have DR where we synchronize with DR. We synchronize at the file system level with DR, which eliminates some of the application limitations.

We are using it on-prem, but we have applications to be upgraded in another 18 months, which would be a hybrid cloud.

Its installation the first time was overwhelming. Once you get used to it, the team settles down, and you have knowledgeable people, it is a breeze.

We have an integrator, a reseller, and a consultant. Somebody would come in and help us connect the dots. I guess that is their reseller, and then the integrator helps us properly connect the dots.

Pedro is our accounts manager. He probably comes from Puerto Rico, and then there is Lincoln Walters from Jamaica. Together, they help us identify the resources we need for the things that we want to do.

The biggest ROI is in terms of the reduction of human resources required to manage and maintain it. The administrative duties have been vastly reduced. You can even have resources from Red Hat. They have something where you can block certain hours a month and you can just use them as needed. If you do not use them entirely, you can reallocate them. That means you can reallocate unused resources. There are savings on investment.

We are still learning about it, but our TCO has reduced because we do not have to have as much manpower, hardware, and processes to manage and operate.

Licensing is the most attractive part of it. With Red Hat Insights and Ansible, we now know that it was done with the intention of simplifying the licensing so that you get the support for what you have and not necessarily what you want to have.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not helped us to centralize development. We have not capitalized on that as yet. I am here at the Red Hat Summit to learn about Kubernetes and containers. It is all new to me, and at this point, I do not know from where to start. I am getting exposed to so many things, but I still need to understand from where to start. I need to know the foundations. In about 18 months, we will be going to containers. We have people developing Dockers, Kubernetes, and other things, but we need to find a way to integrate them. We will have containers running on OpenShift, but we need to know how to secure, store, and manage those containers.

I have participated in a few presentations, and I see that there are prescribed ways to ensure that you maintain compliance by upgrading. In one of the presentations, one of the presenters said to not expand or scale too quickly because some of the applications get left behind. That is something that I am taking away.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be good for keeping our organization agile. It is flexible. They say, "Build once and run anywhere." That is the buzzword for me.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would say that Linux is for beginners, whereas Red Hat Enterprise Linux comes with the bells and whistles and the stability for business. It is an enterprise-grade software.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten. There is innovation and adaptability. Ten years ago, it was unheard of. It has grown, and it has been growing tremendously.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for running various things. We have a lot of virtual machines. The applications that are running on it are a bunch of shell scripts for processing orders, marketing campaigns, generating reports, or running some Java applications.

We have the customization capability. We can easily customize it, and we can also automate and deploy it. I have a command line interface. I am a command line junkie, and I am able to use that, config files, and Ansible to be able to easily figure out what I need to do to automate things. It feels like I know what it is doing and how to make it do what I want. I do not have to weave some magical arcane hack the way I have to do in Windows.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development in a lot of ways. We have it hooked in through our GitHub. We are trying to combine where we are storing things and then have a standard way of how we are deploying things and have some standard configurations. With every single server, we do not have to worry about how to set this up because we are doing the same thing the same way. We can just do it across the board, and then we only have to worry about the interesting parts.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features are great for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance. There are published CVEs, and there is SELinux, which I do not use and I always turn it off. Firewalls and tooling around that make it easy to use. The automation on top of that makes it easy to configure. With a push of a button, it is done.

We do not have to worry too much about portability. We are coming from Oracle Linux. We were primarily an Oracle Linux shop, and because that is based on it, it just works. We have not had any issues.

The fact that it is Linux is valuable. Why I like it in general is that I know what it is doing. I can figure out what it is doing, and I can make it do what I want. I am not delving into arcane registry things.

I am still trying to figure out the features it has. There is so much that it can do. What it does really well is that it allows you to do things.

It was probably 2008 when I first started using it. The company was using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and I was with the internal help desk supporting the Linux side.

Its stability is great. It is stable and rock-solid.

Its scalability is also great. It does not matter if the host is beefy or not. It is just going to run on it, and it is going to handle the work. Whether you have a couple of cores or 64 cores, it is just going to do it.

Their support is good. There is good responsiveness. They quickly get me to the person who knows the answer, but I have not used them much.

Positive

We were using Oracle Linux. We are switching because of some of the things. Oracle licensing has been a point of frustration. Their support is comparably difficult to work with, and the support documentation is a mess.

Red Hat is so much easier to navigate. It has been overall a much more pleasant experience to work with Red Hat.

We are using it on-prem, and then our cloud is a Kubernetes cluster on AWS, so it is basically on-prem.

Our deployment model is a manual kickstart with Ansible for configuration. My experience with deployment is good. I kickstart it and then hit it with Ansible, and it is done. It is very easy.

I did the deployment on my own.

We have not yet seen an ROI. It has not been in for long enough. There are no savings in terms of manhours because the actual day-to-day usage remains the same with Oracle Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, getting some of the metrics with Red Hat Insights is going to be helpful as we get into a better patching cycle. I am anticipating an easier life.

We are expecting an overall decline in the costs because of the differences between the Red Hat licensing and Oracle licensing. We are expecting a net decrease in overall cost. For using it, other than the license, there is no cost.

The setup cost is non-existent. With licensing, there was a little snafu because I misread something. There was a slight learning curve because we use virtual data center licensing. We had to understand how it all maps. We had to understand how that mapping works when the hypervisors are Red Hat or VMware. There is a slight learning curve, but it worked out. It ends up being easy.

I did not evaluate other options mainly because I have had experience with it before. From my prior experience, I already knew what I wanted.

We are trying to use Red Hat Insights. I need to finish updating the playbooks to hook our host. We are in the midst of transitioning from Oracle Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I have not fully hooked everything in, but we will be using Red Hat Insights.

We just started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. We have not yet seen any impact of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on containerization projects.

If a colleague is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a lot of it would depend on their use case, what they are going to need for it, and whether they have an enterprise environment. There is a cost associated with it which can be a downside. I am an open-source lover. I do not like paying for stuff, but I get it. They need to look at the cost, and if the cost is prohibitive, they need to look at something that is compatible and as similar as possible.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten. I generally do not give out a ten. There needs to be something spectacular for a ten, so that is my personal bias against the top of the scale.

We are deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our primary Linux OS, and we are using Ansible for some automation initiatives. Our use cases are around centralization.

We have a supported product. We are at the beginning of building a relationship with Red Hat similar to the one we have with Microsoft, Cisco, and others. It is to standardize the quality, supported version, and company. I am leading this project, and I believe Red Hat is the one.

We have built a hybrid environment. Most of it is on-prem, but we also have Azure, so we have both cloud and on-prem environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is helpful for patch and vulnerability management. There have been a lot of security initiatives around Windows and tightening it up, but our Linux environment was not standardized. Red Hat Enterprise Linux standardizes it. With the combination of Insights, it aligns with Windows and other security initiatives.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not yet enabled us to centralize development. It is too early for that. I am not very familiar with OpenShift, but with OpenShift, Kubernetes containers, and some of those capabilities, DevOps will become more integrated with Red Hat and its products in the future.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s built-in security features seem very good when it comes to risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance. One thing that helps is the catalog of preexisting playbooks provided by Red Hat around security. It helps you ramp up on security. It aligns it with what an IT person on the Windows side already knows to look for, such as firewalls, setting up permissions, etc. They have playbooks for Active Directory integration, security initiatives, and limiting the firewall. Building out some of the playbooks that Red Hat has in those areas was helpful in getting a good security posture for those systems.

Ansible is going to make the portability of applications and containers happen for us. The OS is important, but our ability to use Ansible and deploy via a cloud or automate via a cloud or on-prem would accomplish that.

Red Hat Insights is valuable. There is patch and vulnerability management. It is similar to what you would see with SCCM. I have a single pane of glass interface. I can approve the patches and vulnerabilities, and hopefully, between Satellite and Ansible, we can automate that process.

I am looking for training. I am a Windows guy who accidentally became a Linux guy. You volunteer a few times, and you are the guy. Right now, I am looking for training and ramping up to be able to support their products, so professional services are key. There are things like Lightspeed with IBM Watson. I do not know YAML very well, so it is going to be integral for me to create playbooks at the very beginning and be able to use the AI tools. If I say, "How do I open a port on this Cisco router?", the AI tools are going to give me the YAML code. In spite of not being a Linux guy or a great coder, I can use those tools to ramp up very quickly. Making Lightspeed a part of Red Hat deployment initiatives tremendously helps with customers' success. It gives them that extra tool. Right now, it is being sold separately as a subscription. If they could integrate that capability, people would not have to go use ChatGPT and other tools. They could use that as a part of it. It would just align things with Red Hat, so one area they can improve on is the approach to customer success for new deployments.

Red Hat Insights are instrumental in identifying vulnerabilities. I am still learning, but my understanding is that it is not directly connected to your environment to deploy a patch or vulnerability fix. It is going to give a YAML playbook to do that. It does not actually execute it. On the Windows side, I have an approval process on the server where I can say, "Deploy this patch." I thought of Insights along the same lines where I can just approve things, and then based on some backend configuration, it will implement them using Ansible, Satellite, and on-premises Ansible. It seems disconnected right now. It might not be, but to me, there seems to be a gap there. I love Insights, and I want to fully automate that approval process. This could be a point for improvement if it does not already do that.

Another area of improvement is Red Hat expressing a return on investment better. I do not know if they have determined a lot of that. I have always assumed that I could go with an open-source OS in a less expensive manner than Windows or something else. My impression is that there would be less cost, but I do not know that for certain. Red Hat building out some of that ROI on different products would be beneficial to their sales effort.

We are a brand new customer.

It is more stable than the wild west environment that I have been in. There is standardization. It is stable by standardizing.

So far, its scalability has been good. Once I get a good image built, I will get some workflows built into Ansible. I will have that process all the way down to the help desk. We will be entering variables and kicking out systems all day.

We have been using it minimally. We have about 15% Linux environment with lots of flavors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is what we are centralizing on from now on, so we are going to do a conversion of all those. We have a new standard going forward. We have about 15% Linux systems, which would amount to about 150 systems throughout North America. It is a small footprint.

I have not had to call them much, so I do not have a good handle on support from Red Hat. Everybody gets at least a C or a five, but I am optimistic. It is going to be good. I would give them at least a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Prior to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it was CentOS and others. CentOS was free. It was whatever was available or the developers or applications guys were familiar with.

We switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for centralization, to be supported, and for patching and vulnerabilities.

Most of the things that I am deploying or replacing are on-prem and on Azure cloud. It is 50/50.

The deployment was very easy. They have a great and user-friendly installation process with 9.x and above. However, just being new to it and having a security hat on, I still struggle with what should and should not be installed on the base image. It is a learning curve for me, but using the interface has been great. I was able to join Active Directory and all those things.

CDW is handling our professional services and our training, which is a separate purchase. Its initial rollout is with CDW.

We have not yet seen an ROI.

It is expensive. Everything is. I was happy to get a three-year Red Hat Enterprise Linux contract for our initial rollout. 

It is less expensive than other solutions. It is a growing company.

It is called Microsoft ARC. It now facilitates patches for Linux, but it did not include certain things. For me, there was much more benefit outside of just patching by going with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ansible.

I am not yet certain about Red Hat Insights' vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance. We are at the beginning. We are just adding systems. I have not set those alerts up if they exist. I assume there are some. I am also going to evaluate how accurate the vulnerability and patching information is because we have other security products that are looking at the same things on the Windows side, and they have already identified many of the vulnerabilities. As a new customer, I want to make sure that if our other system says something is a vulnerability, Red Hat Insights also says that it is a vulnerability. I want to feel confident in the vulnerabilities that I am getting from Red Hat Insights. I want to make sure that other products are also scanning for the same thing. I suspect it is.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would recommend going for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I cannot think of another OS that can match this.

I will start off with an optimistic ten, and I will rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.

I use the product for the integration capabilities it provides between my company's servers and the servers from other companies since we operate in the banking sector. I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for clusters or load balancing. The tool provides an open-source platform to use any program. Many programs can be installed over Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I have seen that the upgrade from RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 can be a bit problematic since I have seen some issues during the upgrade of libraries, along with some conflicts with the other libraries in the tool. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in the product. Presently, I am not trying to upgrade from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9.

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

It is a stable solution.

I have only used a little bit of technical support. I can say that over the span of years that I have used the tool, I have used the support offered by the product only twice. I don't have much experience when it comes to the support team. The support team did not help me solve my issues, and I had to search for a resolution by myself to solve my problems. People from India who are a part of the support team don't seem to have much experience in solving the product-related problems of the customers. I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

Neutral

My company also uses MariaDB as a database, while at times, we use databases from Oracle or PostgreSQL over RHEL.

Sometimes, I use Ubuntu for some of the end-users in my company. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is useful for servers and not for end users. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is very compatible with servers.

The upgradation and migration parts attached to the solution can be described as a very straightforward and easy process. Sometimes, I migrate from the on-premises version to the cloud, which I find to be a very easy process. The servers are up and running very well, so I have no problems with the product.

I have experience with the on-premises version of the product.

The in-house team, consisting of four people, in my company takes care of the upgrade and migration parts attached to the solution.

My company has acquired five to ten licenses from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

My company uses the normal security features provided by the product. Presently, I am taking some courses related to security. My company uses solutions for security purposes, like CrowdStrike Falcon Protection.

I use the documentation provided by the product. I also joined the academy operated by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to learn about courses related to OpenShift and virtualization. The documentation is very easy to understand, and it is also good for learning purposes.

I joined the product's academy courses when Red Hat opened a new branch in Egypt. I have got certificates for learning about OpenShift and virtualization. I am planning to learn OpenStack.

For provisioning and patching, I use Foremen, which is an open-source product implemented by Red Hat Satellite. Foremen is very good and easy to use for patching and security updates.

Leapp or Red Hat Insights are not features that are enabled by default. I don't usually use the aforementioned in the product.

I use Red Hat Store for image-building purposes. Some other programs are installed after the images get installed with the help of the product.

Speaking about whether I use the web console or Convert2RHEL, I would say that I use the terminal console provided by the product, and it is also very easy for me to use.

The product has affected my company's security and uptime since Linux offers a firewall that provides complete security, which is very good.

I hope to use the product in a hybrid environment.

I need to prepare for security standard certifications from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since it can help me understand the features and the security that I need to get from the product for my company, making it something very important for my organization.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a big part of my company since we use a lot of servers with its open-source services. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) serves as the base of the servers in our company.

Sometimes, I take care of the maintenance of the product, but it is not something that is required all the time. The maintenance process is pretty normal.

As a part of our company's migration or upgrade plans to stay updated, I will be upgrading from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9.

The product does what it is meant for, especially if MariaDB is installed over the tool.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.