Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

I use the solution in my company mainly for the operation system of the core business applications.

My company has experienced benefits from the use of the product, especially considering the agility that the tool offers in terms of the time to market in different areas of business and because of its compatibility with most of the applications in the market.

The most valuable features of the solution are the stability and scalability.

I run Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on a hybrid cloud deployment, and it has impacted our company's operations, but I would say that it has been quite simple to implement, especially considering the security, which has been a considerable piece of the infrastructure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped centralize development in our company. The applications run with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and it became the standard for the operating system for the applications.

My company uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for containerization projects with OpenShift. This use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has had an important impact on containerization, as it is a simple process. Owing to the simplicity, we always involve the solution's experts and get faster solutions.

The built-in features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance are very important because our company is always aware of all these security issues that constantly happen.

Though the product has many features, the tool's virtualization area has certain shortcomings that require improvement. The product should also offer more containers and probably some financial services.

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

It is a very stable solution.

It is a quite easily scalable solution.

The technical support for the solution is very good. I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

Before Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), my company used to use Windows. My company started to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) after we found that it offers more stability, sophistication, and security and serves as a standard for many products.

The product's initial deployment phase was easy and quick.

My company did follow some strategy to deploy the product, and we also had the support from the vendor.

The solution is deployed on the cloud and on-premises models.

My company sought the help of a system integrator during the implementation phase of the solution.

In terms of ROI, I see that the tool offers stability, performance, agility, and resilience.

If I describe my experience with the product's price, I would say that we have to live with it for now.

My company evaluated other Linux products, such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), against Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I would recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to a colleague who is looking at open-source cloud-based operating systems for Linux since it is a tool with more market experience and offers more documentation and support from the vendor, which is not easy to acquire when it comes to open-source software.

Red Hat's portfolio has affected the total cost of ownership across our enterprise landscape by around 10 to 20 percent.

My company has the product in two data centers, but the production happens only in one. Mostly, my company uses the cloud services offered by Azure.

I rate the tool a nine or ten out of ten.

I utilize Ansible to harden Red Hat devices across a multitude of disconnected environments.

One benefit of using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that a lot of backend applications run natively on Red Hat Enterprise Linux as opposed to a Windows-based option. We are a partner with Red Hat. It essentially allows us to do a lot of our infrastructure stand-up and development.

It has enabled our team to centralize development. We have been able to centralize our automation, playbooks, and different collections we use within Ansible to create a centralized code base. We can use that to configure different types of systems with different requirements from different customers. Having a common platform across the entire enterprise has been very helpful.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux very limitedly for containerization projects. It makes things very seamless. If we get a new developer, we can set up a brand new instance of a container for a dev environment or a test environment. It allows different developers to always have the same starting points with containers.

In terms of security features for risk reduction, there are SELinux and FIPS. Also, when you build a Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine, you can stick it right out of the box. It is very helpful. It is very good, especially for programmers and users who do not know anything about cybersecurity. It takes you 85% to 90% of the way. It has been very helpful and good.

The right commonality across the business or enterprise is always very hard to do, especially when different networks and different customers have different requirements. Being able to at least have continuity between those different environments has been helpful. If you have a system admin at a location and you put him or her at a different location, they at least can expect the same type of infrastructure.

When it comes to compliance, it takes you 85% to 90% of the way there. Different networks require different things. Some cannot implement specific standards for whatever reasons, but being able to utilize and leverage Red Hat Ansible to configure that and make sure those changes are made across the entire network has been very helpful.

Portability depends on the circumstances. Some things are more portable than others, such as containers. We utilize Ansible Core very extensively, but other things, such as AAP, are not necessarily as portable because some of our smaller environments do not have the bandwidth or the actual resources to support a big product like that.

In Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I am a big fan of the command line. I like the data manipulation and different commands that we can use. I use Ansible extensively to configure systems.

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

It is very stable.

It is easily scalable with the solutions and the options they have.

Their support is very good. They are very helpful. Some of them are more experienced in handling the niche problems that we have.

I would rate their customer support a nine out of ten because there is always room for improvement, but it has always been very good.

Positive

We have used Ubuntu and other Linux operating systems in the past. However, since I have been with the company, we have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux almost exclusively.

The deployment model depends on the environment. Some are using VMs. Some use containers, and some use bare-metal installations. It depends on what a particular program needs. I support small environments that are on-prem.

It is fairly straightforward to deploy different Red Hat boxes. I was just helping out a sysadmin the other day who had not done it before. It was super straightforward and super easy to deploy.

We deploy it on our own. 

The return on investment for us and our team is specifically automation. We are able to invest time on the frontend to create different automation playbooks, and we are able to push that out to not only a singular network but also to multiple networks and multiple different configurations. It takes a little bit in the beginning, but there are huge time savings in the end.

If a security colleague is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would be interested to understand what that colleague's objectives are and why they would consider something other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If it is something that fits their particular use case more, they can obviously go with that. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a standard solution for Linux. If any colleague wants to go for another solution, I have to understand why. I would have to understand what Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not able to provide. However, this has not happened to me.

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

We primarily use it for enterprise software, databases, and some custom applications.

We have a stable base to deploy applications. We need a minimal amount of effort to troubleshoot problems with the applications that are related to the OS.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud, in the on-prem data center, and at the edge. We are also using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a hybrid cloud environment. It has had a positive impact. It is straightforward to deploy. There was no bottleneck.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development. The stable base that each developer can rely on is great. The consistent ecosystem of the repository makes it easy to rely on.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quick to containerize, so when it started becoming mainstream, it was easier for us to sell to upper management to start doing more containerization.

There has been a positive impact in terms of the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for keeping our organization agile. It is very portable. I do not have any issues with different ecosystems in relation to how Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs containers.

Our cost of ownership is not high. They are not very expensive. We are never surprised.

The repository ecosystem is valuable. 

I would probably focus more on a rolling release schedule. Instead of a long-term operating support of ten years, I would just have one release and keep rolling it.

In terms of security features, overall, it is lacking cohesion. There are a lot of different options, and it is hard to choose the ones that best fit our business needs without a lot of investigative work.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 11 years.

It is very stable.

It is scalable.

It takes a little bit to get to the true answer. I know there is a lot of triaging. I am sure we can improve on our end. When we open tickets, we can provide more information. There could be a way to get faster answers from Red Hat support, and we might not be providing the most upfront information needed for the ticket. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

We were not using any other solution previously.

I know of only one other player, and that is Ubuntu. There is also OpenSUSE, but I have not yet seen that personally in my career.

We have cloud and on-prem deployments. We have the AWS cloud.

On AWS, we had an EC2 instance. I clicked, and it was online. For the initial deployment, we just used the Amazon Web UI, and now, we use Ansible for deployment.

We have seen an ROI. It is fairly easy to deploy. We do not have too many issues with setting up a new environment in relation to the operating system. The bottlenecks are more related to the hardware or even setting up the cloud.

When I came in, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was already being used. It has always been there.

We have not yet fully leveraged Red Hat Insights. We are working on that. It might help with cohesion and security.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten. It is reliable for deploying applications. It has a lot of different features. I can find solutions to all my problems, and the industry support is there.

We have a lot of Oracle databases, Tomcat, and Java microservices running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

A lot of our applications are like Java microservices. Deploying them on a Unix platform is so much easier. It's open-sourced and provides a lot of compatibility. It makes it easier for us to roll out applications. It is compatible with most Java microservices applications.

We like that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a vendor-supported product. When we have problems, we just call Red Hat Enterprise Linux for support. The product employs a lot of automation tools to manage its OS. We love using Red Hat Satellite. We have close to 5000 servers. Managing individual servers would be a nightmare.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite help us automate our repetitive tasks. Every flavor of Linux distribution has its own specialties. The product offers a lot of integration within the Red Hat products suite. We use Red Hat products mostly, so it works for us.

The vendor keeps rolling out many packets, which complicates our job. We keep patching our servers. CVEs come out all the time. However, having a solid and secure OS will make our life much easier.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2004.

I never had any problem with support. I didn't have any issues that I did not get a resolution for. Sometimes, it takes a little bit of time, but eventually, it gets resolved.

Positive

I was using AIX, which is also an IBM product. IBM bought Red Hat Enterprise Linux. AIX was more expensive and required IBM System p. Moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was much easier because it is a lot more compatible with the regular hardware like HP and Dell that we buy on the market.

I have seen an improvement in our deployment. When we have applications running on Windows, it takes longer to get them set up and provisioned, and the security is different compared to Red Hat.

The pricing could be better. The tool is getting expensive. Before, we could license only the hypervisor where Red Hat Enterprise Linux is running. Now, if a customer has a 12-node hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux forces customers to license all 12, even though they use only six.

We evaluated SUSE. At that time, SUSE did not have good support. We needed good support worldwide.

We use AWS and Microsoft Azure as our cloud providers. We don't use the off-the-shelf product that we get from the cloud. We build around it because we have a standard template. When we deploy our solution in the cloud, all the security features we need are already within the OS, as opposed to using the cloud OS and applying all the changes we need. It's easier to get our template to the cloud and use it.

The licensing for the cloud environment is totally different than the on-premise one. We use the Virtual Datacenter license on-premises. I don't see any difference because Red Hat Enterprise Linux still supports it, whether on-premise or on the cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux knows its product. Whenever I have an issue, an engineer gets assigned to me. I can always escalate if needed. We're not using every host that we license. We ensure that we can fail over smoothly on every single hypervisor. It's fair to license them. We're not using it, but we're still paying for it. I do not like it, but it is a business cost.

We migrate workloads to the cloud. I never upgrade an OS. I usually replace the old OS with a new OS and migrate the application. I use the OS versions 7, 8, and 9. The migration is pretty straightforward. AWS and Azure have a tool that we can use to integrate with our environment. It's a lift and shift. We grab the VM from our on-premise hypervisors and move it to the cloud.

We use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform mostly for patching and upgrading to the next revisions. We don't upgrade from one OS to another. We build on a new OS and get all the applications running there. Once the application is running, we move all the workload from the old OS to the new OS. There's no impact on the existing system.

I don't do the day-to-day patching because we have a managed service. However, it does create interruption. When we do a patch, we have to reboot, especially when there's a kernel update. It causes an outage. I have used Red Hat Insights. It gives us insight into what's happening on every single Red Hat VM that we have. It tells us if it's behind or has some performance bottlenecks. It gives us visibility on the health of the whole OS.

People who are looking into the product must get a good account manager. We must have a good account manager who we can always contact and who gives us all the updates that we need. They keep us in the loop on what is happening in the Red Hat world. We are satisfied with the product.

Overall, I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

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.

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 Red Hat Enterprise Linux for VMs and physical servers. 

The containerized platform will help us use ROSA. 

The tool's most valuable feature is OpenShift. We plan to move all our applications to microservices. The container platform is integrated into one.

I opened a few cases, and the tool's support responded quickly. 

Positive

Deployment is simple if you have been using the solution for a long time. However, it can be complex if you are new to it. 

We use RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 on on-premises. RHEL 8 is on the AWS. There is a security policy like CIS when deploying the solution. You can embed it on the image. I am not sure if there is HIPAA compliance yet. 

Migration from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 is easy. Upgrade depends on the application that is running on each instance. You need to check if it is compatible with the kernel. We need to plan things before migrating to the latest version. We need to stay current to ensure compliance. We plan to move from RHEL 7 to RHEL 9 and use RHEL 8 and RHEL 9. 

We use Red Hat insights but do not utilize them. It helps with the remediation. I use Image Builder to build AWS and GCP images. I haven't deployed them. 

I rate the product a nine out of ten.