Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

My main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is as a server for our database servers, our middleware servers, and the application servers. Everything besides SAP falls into this category. SAP is currently running on SUSE Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points by being a quite integrated system. Working together with Ansible and the Ansible Automation Platform, we did a lot to have a standardized platform, including consistent hardening and everything in a very good managed way.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) I like the most are its central management, which is really good to have, including some connections to our CMDB to see what is in our inventory, what is used and so on. That is quite beneficial.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved by enhancing its central tools side. We use a lot of automated discovery for CMDB topics through Satellite and the facts. It would be really interesting to have a more consistent inventory already in place that we can access to pull into a CMDB because we have a highly automated approach there, and there is some room for improvement.

I have been working in this field for twenty years.

Regarding the reliability and stability of the platform, I have not experienced any downtime or crashes on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) side. We are quite stable and do not have major issues with that.

The scalability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is more based on our hypervisor level; we mainly use VMware, so the scalability is essentially at this level. We do not have any issues at the OS level itself.

The customer service and technical support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is quite good. We also did some projects with the consulting of Red Hat directly to bring in the OpenShift features, and we are very happy with how they manage that. I would rate the customer service and technical support a nine out of ten.

Prior to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we used AIX, which was replaced. We also used HPUX, which was replaced. We still have SUSE in place for our SAP systems, which we maintain as well.

The difference between those products and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that I think Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is one of the biggest players. I am trying to find a reliable player in the market for the future. We obviously tried to pull out these niche products. AIX is now a niche product. HPUX is dying, and all those products are from the past. We had to maintain them to a certain point as the applications were there, but now we have migrated most of them to the modern platforms, which helps with reducing costs as we do not have to maintain many platforms.

The deployment process for us is straightforward; we now have a fully automated process, so that is quite easy for us.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), from my point of view, relates to standardization, allowing us to have fewer operating systems. We are currently using just two OS providers on Linux, which makes maintainability easier.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that the pricing is acceptable for us. As a big company, I would say it is fair pricing right now. We have to observe that a lot of companies are increasing their prices significantly over the last decades, like VMware and so on. We keep a close look at that, but currently, it is acceptable pricing.

I have not considered switching from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) at any time since purchasing it.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on-premises.

We also use Lightspeed.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has not yet helped our AI workloads. We do not have many AI workloads right now. We are having a couple of pilot projects in AWS on AWS native workloads, but it is just in a starting phase. Therefore, there is not a high demand right now in our company.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) plays a role in our company's implementation of the zero-trust model mainly on the workload side since we have a couple of other products around regarding network and other areas. We are using mainly server functionality from Red Hat in our current setup and not the on-top products.

We have done a major version upgrade with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and the Ansible Automation Platform. We have a quite good life cycle, so we are running through the life cycles each year to the new versions.

The experience has been good. We have not had any major issues. This year, we are also doing in-place upgrades. Before that, we did replacements with new machines and migrations, but since this year we are running in-place upgrades, which is quite good and causes less trouble than expected.

Our company's process for managing regulatory compliance is more related to the auditing we obviously have with NIS2 and all this in the EU. Each year, we have a couple of audits ongoing. However, the audits themselves do not really look into the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) implementation; it is more on a higher level. We are obviously pulling reports for the audit of the hardening compliance and so on of our systems to prove that the things are implemented.

My overall experience using the Ansible Automation Platform has been quite good. We come from an infrastructure where we had a lot of managed service providers using their own automations. About five years ago, we decided to stop that and build our own automation platform. All our managed service providers have to use that. We developed that, set it up, and it is a really good success story as we now have all our automations internal. We have full responsibility for it, which works out quite well, allowing us not to change anything if we have to change a provider in the backend.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risks at my company mainly through controlling planned downtime. This means if we are doing patching and so on, we have a good setup with our CMDB to maintain controlled patching cycles and reboot cycles over our whole environment in the agreed timeframes and windows. It does not really help to mitigate downtimes, but it makes the planning of downtimes better.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is quite good and has improved a lot. We can quickly find what we need. My team uses it a lot.

My advice to other companies considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is to focus from the start on having automation in place. Do not wait too long, as it makes things much easier if we implement everything through automation from the beginning rather than doing it manually. My overall rating for this review is nine out of ten.

On-premises

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I have experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), using both the cloud-based and on-premises versions, with a focus on the on-premises deployment. As an infrastructure support engineer and senior manager, my main use cases include providing infrastructure for all applications and businesses. This encompasses user account management, application handling, and operating system requirements for each virtual machine. We are building and delivering products using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and we also utilize Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite for patching the operating system and other Red Hat applications.

We use a ton of operating systems in our environment. We have Red Hat flavors, CentOS, Ubuntu, and multiple Debian versions. I have previously used AIX and Windows servers, with multiple versions of Windows as well. We maintain diversity in operating system usage.

Recently, we purchased Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with support on a host-based license model. We previously used a per-host-wise license structure, but we opted for the highest license option, which provides unlimited virtual machines per host. The total investment was approximately 1.2 million dollars for around 1,100 hosts.

The purpose of this engagement was to gather survey information regarding Red Hat products and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system. I understand this will provide better insight into how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) effectively targets customer inquiries.

The pros of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in comparison to other solutions I have used include that in most performance aspects, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is very robust and active in terms of performance, operating system strength, security, and lightweight efficiency.

The best features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include its open-source nature in terms of the Linux background and kernel. The enhancements and features offer various options with timely updates and security measures. You have multiple choices on how to control security and fix bugs. You can modify and tweak the kernel according to your convenience. If you need to perform automation of your own choice, modifications can be made to perform as per your requirements. This can be done in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or any Linux-based operating system, but Windows has a ton of limitations. Even for bug fixes in Windows, you cannot announce fixes to others globally. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has an open-source community for this purpose, and CentOS has similar benefits. For patching solutions, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has its own patching solution such as Satellite. There is also live patching available, including kernel live patching, which is an excellent option for minimal application downtime.

The most important security features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include the ability to control login access with multiple layers of security, such as two-factor authentication. Key-based authentication is one of the best options, and two-factor authentication is also beneficial. You can disable the root user, so normal users will not see or have access to system-secured commands unless they have sudo access. The kernel is much more secure, and most viruses do not affect the Linux kernel because all things are treated as files without extensions, which reduces virus impact in that area. Although any operating system can be vulnerable, Linux is less vulnerable than others.

I did not explore Red Hat Insights much and do not have substantial knowledge about this feature.

Deployment is very easy and straightforward. I did not find any issues with it. Even with automation, it is very easy.

I would suggest that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) improve the graphical user interface-based experience in a much better way. If you compare with most preferences, many people are more habituated with Windows. If Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can improve the graphical user interface experience and gaming scope, it would benefit users. Windows handles gaming much better, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is more focused on the enterprise edition and server support. If Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) improves the graphical user interface experience, it would be better for users in terms of costing and user experience.

Another suggestion concerns Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform support. I believe Red Hat should provide much better engineers who have greater experience with their product. Although they have knowledge bases and training programs, I feel that Indian engineers at Red Hat are not as effective or experienced with their own product. I have faced some challenges with support level in this area.

Regarding the centralized patching system, Red Hat Satellite should support other operating systems beyond Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I have observed that Red Hat Satellite has limitations and only supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Most organizations use multiple flavors of operating systems. Excluding Windows and considering only Linux operating systems such as Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, or SUSE Linux, Red Hat Satellite should support these with a rollback option. If Red Hat Satellite includes support for other operating systems with guaranteed rollback functionality, customers would accept it very readily and would not even consider the price.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for almost 11 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is much more stable in comparison to other operating systems. In terms of failures, sometimes no responses come and occasionally the system hangs up. However, the reasons for these issues are not particularly based on the operating system itself. Stability issues depend on memory and other applications running on the system. I cannot say that issues occur because of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or Red Hat applications. I have not observed much issue or lagging from the operating system or Red Hat application perspective. We receive more than 99.99% uptime from the operating system perspective for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Expansion is fine with no issues. The only limitation is that the XFS file system cannot be reduced. Any troubleshooting and expansion tasks are adopted smoothly.

In our environment, most of what we run is critical. Red Hat has their own service level agreement, and we have our technical account manager ready. Whenever there is any urgency, we connect with our technical account manager who helps us resolve the issue within our expected timeframe. It depends on the urgency, but when we request assistance, they fulfill it. Our experience has been very good with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compared to other operating systems and original equipment manufacturers.

For any downtime, whether it is a priority one, priority two, or priority three case, their response time is one hour. They usually respond before that timeframe. I have faced some issues with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform support and did not see that much effectiveness, but regarding the operating system itself, the service has been very good. As I mentioned earlier, for kernel modification and hardening, Red Hat has provided good support.

Positive

I deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) myself, and a third party also conducted deployments for us. I have my own hands-on experience in production environments with both manual and automation processes. We deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) using Terraform and other third-party tools. I used AWS Lambda and many other tools to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems.

We purchased Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) directly from Red Hat through their verified vendors. Red Hat does not sell directly but works through their own verified vendors for purchases.

When you use the image builder, the custom image will be standardized and signed off by the original equipment manufacturer, which is Red Hat. When it is certified and signed off by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), enterprises and auditors will accept it. If we create any custom images on our own, they will be standardized, but the image release will not be certified from the original equipment manufacturer. This can lead to many questions from auditors. However, when Red Hat signs off on the image, it is a good positive point to present to the auditor as evidence. My overall rating for this solution is 8 out of 10.

My main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is using it as an operating system for all of our Linux VMs, converting all of them from 42 different operating systems and versions over to Red Hat.

One pain point that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve is patch management, as we previously used a giant Ansible playbook that would run updates across our infrastructure with so many conditionals in it, but now we can simplify it down to essentially just one. It was previously one playbook, but it simplifies the workload to approximately half of what it was.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I like the most include the cohesion among all of our VMs, so I do not have to remember that if I am SSHing into this server, it is apt update, and this one it is DNF update, and that one it is yum update; it is all going to be the same, DNF or yum update for all of them.

For navigating security risks in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Satellite is a big feature for us, as in the last couple of weeks, we just had two critical security vulnerabilities come out for Linux, and we use Satellite to find all of the vulnerable servers and then Ansible to patch them as soon as Red Hat releases a kernel update.

I have used System Roles quite heavily, so I want to use Image Builder, but I have not used it yet. All of our Ansible playbooks and roles focus on using System Roles first so that future iterations and updates to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 11 will work going forward.

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

Regarding the stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I have experienced no downtime, crashes, or performance issues; it has been flawless. We have had no issues with it, and the only waiting period we experienced was for the two recent security issues because someone jumped the gun and published the exploits too early, but that is nothing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can control.

In terms of scalability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales wonderfully; we have about 400 VMs, and as I mentioned, we are converting all of our existing VMs over, whether that is a straight conversion using convert to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scripts or a rebuild. I have had both five Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) VMs and also had 200 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) VMs, and honestly, it has been no different; when running reports, it just takes maybe a minute longer to grab everything.

My experience with customer service and technical support has been phenomenal; I have submitted multiple cases for various issues, and technical support has also been fantastic to work with. The longest I had to wait for a solution was about two days, and what they suggested fixed the issue for us long-term.

The factors that led me to consider a change to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) included running an audit across all of our Linux servers and discovering that there were 42 different versions of operating system or operating system versions; we could maintain that with a bunch of Ansible playbooks, but we did not want to. Another product released by SUSE is similar to Satellite in that it provides an upstream RPM provider, but it did not work very well; it was adequate, but Satellite is by far the best. Standardizing everything has been a huge advantage for us.

I would describe the deployment process of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as straightforward, as I can go into Satellite and spin up a new VM; I have a fully functional VM within 10 to 15 minutes. This is provisioning VMs from nothing essentially, as we are not cloning a template. We initially tried cloning templates, and it only took minutes to have a new VM up and running.

We have not considered any other solutions in the time that we have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), as we just purchased Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) three years ago. However, around that time, we contemplated Ubuntu's enterprise-level agreement, which includes support and extended release for updates; these were the two contenders we really compared, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) beat them by a significant margin.

While I have not used Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in a traditional sense with AI workloads, we have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) VM that one of our Ames Technology Hub members logs into and runs AI workloads, though I do not know what they are using, and I doubt they are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) AI.

In our company implementation of the zero-trust model, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) plays a role by using SE Linux and firewall D to configure everything and set it all up, although we have a different tool for managing Windows and micro-segmentation, and we have not implemented that on Linux since Linux is such a small portion of our company's business.

I have not done a major version upgrade with Ansible Automation Platform because we do not have it yet, but I have done major version upgrades from seven to eight and eight to nine with Satellite using the Leapp package provider. I have not done any nine to 10 upgrades because no applications really support it.

The transition from previous versions to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was smooth; we tried converting all of our existing VMs over to Red Hat, and that was hit or miss on whether it would work. This is through no fault of Red Hat's, as Oracle Linux does not migrate over to Red Hat smoothly, but the major version upgrades have been flawless and have worked every single time.

Our company's process for managing regulatory compliance does not involve Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) playing a role, as we are not a publicly traded company, and we also do not house any PII or credit card information, so we are not under any regulatory compliance. However, our auditing team checks what users have root access to these servers or super user privileges, and at the moment, we just run an active directory audit since they are all joined to our active directory. In the future, I am hoping to set up Red Hat Identity Manager to manage SSH keys and user access into Linux servers.

Overall, I have loved the experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), as I have used Ansible for six years of the seven years I have been doing this professionally. We just hired a new Linux admin, and one of the first questions I asked was about their experience with Ansible. They had worked with it, so I asked about their experience in writing playbooks or roles, and they have written them extensively. I would rate this product a 9.5 out of 10.

On-premises

Microsoft Azure

As the DevOps engineer, my main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) today is as our OS. All our runners run on that, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) UBI containers, which is what we deliver to our customers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) runs our infrastructure and is what we deliver to the customers as well.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) all on-premises on Dell servers.

I have not tried doing AI workloads with any Red Hat AI product specifically, but we are running our AI model server with VLLM on Red Hat systems. We are using it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but not with any Red Hat AI.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps us solve pain points by giving us security and trust. When we tell our customers we are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) images, it helps them trust us that we are using the security and we have all these controls. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) gives us trust and security.

I value the management features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) the most, such as Red Hat Satellite, which allows us to tell and monitor our whole fleet about the status of every system and keep it up to date. The management interfaces are really effective.

For navigating our security risks in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it would probably be mostly Satellite. With Satellite, you can determine which of your systems are out of date. Containers might also show outdated packages. Satellite helps you find systems that have not been updated or systems with old packages.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps mitigate downtime and lower risks. Since Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has all these Ansible and Kickstart and Satellite features, we have a good process of redeploying systems. If something did go down or break, we have all the automation to be able to bring it back up, and we have all that as code. This has been helpful.

I am not certain how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved. We are still on Red Hat 8 mostly, and so I am not really certain about what features have already been released.

From a Red Hat 8 perspective, I think perhaps better container support for running them as services would be beneficial. Maybe Kubernetes support, such as something built-in for if you just want to use the system for running containers and keep them online as services would be valuable.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the whole time, since 2021, which is approximately five years.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). We have had servers that are very stable for many years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has definitely scaled with the growing needs of my company. As we have grown as a company, we have expanded how many servers we have. It has been pretty smooth with Satellite managing it all. You can keep track of everything, so it has been good.

I would rate customer service and technical support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an eight. It is really helpful to be able to open up tickets and get a technical person that can walk you through getting the logs and getting the information. In an ideal ten out of ten, it would be instantaneous support or much faster response times, but we do have a good response time and good support.

I am not certain if my company was using another solution to address our needs prior to using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). There may have been some CentOS or Ubuntu used way back, but I am not certain.

I think we have seen a return on investment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from a technical point of view. The investment comes from when we can deliver our software to customers and they can start immediately using it versus if we are delivering a different OS that someone might not be certain is secure. They trust in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and that we are using that. This allows us to keep delivering at a good pace and getting the software into our customers' hands.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been really good. I am not at the level to buy it, but I think we have a company-wide Red Hat license. We can have as many Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) machines as we want, including all the packages and the containers. It has been positive and good.

We have also looked at Ubuntu while using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Their management platform is Landscape, and it just does not seem as reliable for us. We have had much more issues with Ubuntu from deploying it and hardening it. It does not really seem to work the same for us as Red Hat.

The business value of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) compares favorably to the other Linux distributions we have evaluated, such as Ubuntu. Red Hat definitely has more value. We invest much more time in that because we have so many more Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems, and it has been a much smoother experience. If any project tries to come to us wanting Ubuntu, we try to steer them away and see if Red Hat will work first, because it seems to work better and is more comfortable.

I have tried Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Image Builder, but only as testing. We are not using that in production, but I have used it and created a few images.

The testing with the Image Builder went really well. There were some limitations with what versions of Red Hat the Image Builder supported versus what we were currently using, so I could not really continue testing, but it worked for the walk-through I was following.

I do not know anything in particular in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that has helped me with my AI workloads overall yet. We are still just getting into the space, so I do not know if there is really anything about Red Hat specifically, because we are just running open source tools on Red Hat. However, it is still making us secure from a foundation with a secure OS.

We are not really doing a full zero-trust setup with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), not yet. Having all our devices, such as all our Red Hat devices registered in Satellite, helps you keep tracking them. This is moving towards it, having a management system for everything, but nothing really other than that.

We have not done a major version upgrade with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Ansible Automation Platform, such as moving from Red Hat 8 to Red Hat 9. Whenever we have done that, we just reloaded the system. We use Ansible Automation a lot, but never for a full upgrade.

My experience with the Ansible Automation Platform has been really good. We transitioned to it heavily. Before, we were just using each developer who were running the playbooks themselves. Now we can put them in the platform. The access is really good, so we can have students who can only run certain playbooks or not edit them, which is helpful. Full-timers can set up something that works and then the students can run it as they need. This has been really helpful for us for automating things.

From an OS level, when we are deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we can pick the DISA STIG profiles, and that gives us a good starting point for all our systems to be hardened a certain amount. Then we use the Ansible Automation Platform running Ansible playbooks that can finish the job and finish the rest of the STIG controls. This makes them compliant. We can also run Ansible playbooks that can verify all our systems are at that certain level. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) does a major part, and we use Red Hat for pretty much everything for our compliance.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is really good. Many times I am searching for questions and it will pop up as one of the first few results showing how to solve it. A few weeks ago it helped me solve an issue for a customer. The knowledge base has been really helpful.

The deployment process with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been pretty straightforward. We use the Kickstart process, and then Ansible to finish the deployment. My overall review rating for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is nine out of ten.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) basically runs the bank's apps as my main use case.

I like the feature Satellite the most because it has services to manage my multiple Linux servers.

Satellite has no parallel in the Linux distro world, especially for an enterprise, enabling me to manage my servers, patch them, create content, get them binaries, updated security updates, and all that. It makes it easier for admins and reduces the need for a lot of manpower, especially with Ansible that enables me to do configuration management of 20,000 Linux servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales with the growing needs of my organization very well as we are expanding ourselves.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped mitigate downtime and lower risk because the servers can run for more than 300 days of uptime. I do have to reboot them for patching, but otherwise, they are a very stable operating system that doesn't crash for no reason. If I experience kernel panics, it often involves EDRs or agents such as CrowdStrike, but otherwise, it's very stable with proactive features. We had issues with CrowdStrike; they identified the issue with their kernel drivers that used to crash my OS and provided a patch to address it, so they take care of us.

The implementation had challenges like whenever we bring out new products, there's always one issue: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s documentation is not complete. I have to really have an enterprise account because I get access to their support, which sorts me out since every environment is unique. It's not a cookie cutter; I would deploy RHEL 8 in a way different compared to a retail store. So when it gets to those niche deployments, they don't have anything documented. I really have to get hold of the support, saying, "Hey, I'm trying to do this. It's not working," and then they will give me a solution, but I would expect that a document would have solved that issue without raising a ticket. That's my only complaint.

The area for improvement in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is documentation. I don't have any other suggestions. I think it's just the documentation that needs improvement. Otherwise, technically, I don't have anything to suggest.

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

I have experienced downtime or security incidents as a result of the solution when proper practices are not followed, especially if I am using any third-party security. You have to manage kernel options; otherwise, the base OS itself is very stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales with the growing needs of my organization very well as we are expanding ourselves.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support based on my experience. I felt naive about being a small enterprise versus a big enterprise, but the response time of tickets is consistent. I haven't seen a difference; I thought I would have a slower response being on a small account, but the speed of our calls is the same.

Positive

I considered other solutions before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but it was a default choice for us. I see that they have expanded; earlier, it was just a bare-metal OS and not an ecosystem, but now they are in OpenShift, providing Kubernetes and everything.

I wasn't using another solution to address my needs prior to adopting it.

The upgrade or migration is straightforward if I have applications that depend less on what the OS is, but in our case, it was not that simple. We had a business requirement, so we had to shut down the older one, provision a new one, and move everything.

I have seen ROI from using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in terms of uptime itself.

My experience with pricing, setup, and cost of the solution is that it's a service based on how many cores, not sockets.

My deployment model for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is on-premises, but I am just starting off with cloud.

For security requirements in the cloud, I don't do SELinux; I just depend on my ACLs because my servers are not internet-facing. We trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with the binaries, with nothing on the base OS such as firewalls or SELinux.

I use AWS and Azure as my cloud providers.

I manage my Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for security, updates, and patches with Red Hat Satellite, which makes it very easy.

I have been involved in upgrades from RHEL 6 to 7 and from 7 to 8.

My assessment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s FIPS and security compliance features is that it's the best in the industry. They have FIPS, which I think is more for federal clients, and although I haven't used it, I know they offer it by default on their Linux.

My upgrade and migration plans are to always try to stay on the current version all the time, unless there's a legacy application. Any apps I manage are always on the latest Red Hat release, and we keep migrating them as Red Hat provides the first-ever release out, which is a requirement for our Satellite to support the latest version.

The area for improvement in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is documentation.

I would assess the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as paywalled, so if you don't pay for it, you wouldn't be able to access their system. The KB is pretty good, but you need to have a Red Hat account.

My advice to a company considering this solution is to go for it. It is supported by enterprise support from Red Hat, which I don't think any other enterprise can offer. While I know Canonical does it for Ubuntu, SUSE is another good option; however, the adoption is not there, and you don't have a lot of sysadmins. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a bible due to the abundance of resources in the market. I would rate this solution a 10.

We use Satellite from that list for all our catalog for everything we're pulling down, and we've recently had to upgrade to better Satellite capabilities. For the security aspects, FIPS compliance, SELinux, and all that ticks all the government boxes that we need to stay compliant with our regulations.

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in a hybrid manner, as I am part of the AWS team. We're starting to build a presence in AWS, so I have been putting RHEL images up into there as AMIs and working on them there, but for the most part, it's all on-premises because we run most of our operations in-house in our data centers.

Almost 80 percent of our virtual machines are on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and it's our base image for a lot of our containers, with all of our workflows using RHEL.

Our security team can be very specific about things, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) ticks all our boxes for security, FIPS compliance, SELinux, and all the security features we need. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) meshes extremely well with OpenShift, which is what we use mainly to host all our workloads.

I have been learning about a few new features, but security is my main focus. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10, there's the new remote desktop connection that supports RDC connections, which is really valuable, allowing us to get around a couple of network issues we were having. It boots up really fast, is very lightweight, and the images we use, some of which are hardened, are really nice because we don't have to go in and harden them ourselves.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) features save us a ton of time and money from engineer hours working on security hardening because Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) works out of the box, does what we want it to do, and does it well.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is pretty resilient and bounces back effectively. Recently, we had an issue where some power fluctuations caused many of our servers and virtual machines to go down. None of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) machines were the problem in getting back online because when we flicked the switch back, all our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) boxes were exactly where we needed them to be within minutes, whereas Windows was what gave us the issue.

Remote desktop was really the big feature that I wanted, which came out in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10, and we are just now starting to test out Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10 with our machines. Right now, I'm happy with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because it checks my boxes.

I attended a session on Project Hummingbird, the hardened images for container-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which was really cool. They are breaking down Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) into small, bite-sized pieces, which allows for rolling updates where, when you're updating your system, it's only updating exactly what changed instead of pulling in the whole package. Since we're a disconnected environment, minimizing our downtime is critical, and having these hardened images that just update very modularly really helps us get back on our feet. Focusing on creating a more portable Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) would be great.

Most of what we do involves virtual machines for containers on OpenShift, which meshes extremely well with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I have never taken more than five or ten minutes to get a virtual machine or container up and running from a fresh start because it's extremely simple and streamlined.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could play a bigger role in our company's implementation of the zero-trust model. For the most part, we're a lockdown environment where if you have access to the network and that machine, you're trusted and can have access. Most of our users need to be working on zero trust implementation a little bit better.

Some of the information provided by the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be outdated, and it could be cleaned up a little bit better. However, for the most part, the documentation is pretty easy to follow when you're working with the modern current offerings that Red Hat has to provide.

I have been working in the intelligence community computer field in general for about five and a half years, with NASA specifically for just about a year now, and I've been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the better part of three years.

I have never experienced downtime that wasn't my fault, so I find the stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to be quite impressive.

I have been able to expand my usage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because all of our workloads that need to be scaled up have new Pro containers that pop right up when we need them, ready within a minute. It scales extremely well.

Our Red Hat team has been very good with talking with us, working with us on what we need to get done, and there is very little pain in terms of the actual operating system.

The colleague sitting right next to me is our AI engineer, so I have been riding shotgun on a lot of what he's been doing, and it seems really innovative so far. We just got a batch of GPUs in to start working with this technology and have hit a few roadblocks, but none of that was Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) related.

The customer service and technical support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is extremely technical. Even when we get new team members, we're able to make good connections with them quickly because they're very knowledgeable and know what they're talking about. They answer our questions, and if they can't or it's a new problem, they're more than happy to spend a week or two with us working it out.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the customer service because our Red Hat team is amazing. We go out for lunches, we talk, and when we were setting up OpenShift, we were on the phone with those team members an hour a day, five days a week for months in a row. Anything that we had questions on, they were right there with us, helping us get what we wanted out of the product.

I worked for Auburn University, and we were kind of all over the place with our products, still trying to figure out what we wanted to do. For the last two years I was there, we were just testing products all the time, getting bad support and bad service. We never went to Red Hat while I was there, and I hope they do someday.

I have set up Ansible Automation Platform, but we don't have a whole lot of automated workflows for our operations yet. We still are kind of just manually doing everything we need to do and applying policies, but I did set it up, troubleshooting a few OAuth issues with some authentication mechanisms, which was no problem. The test that we did run with it worked pretty well.

I'm not our Satellite engineer, but I have interfaced with it a few times, and it was really seamless when I used it. I have never really had to be the one troubleshooting anything like that. It hasn't given us much pain from what I know, and our team seems to be pretty happy about those operations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) features save us a ton of time and money from engineer hours working on security and infrastructure operations because Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) works out of the box, does what we want it to do, and does it well.

I don't think my company has ever considered choosing another product other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because they've been on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since I got there, and they've been on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the longest time, which I feel has become the industry standard at this point.

Every operating system we use has to meet a certain set of regulations set by a board way above us, and we don't really get to choose what operating systems we implement. It goes through a multi-year process of being scanned and tested, and then they give that to us and say we are authorized to use it. Most of that is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because most of what our center runs on is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and we stick with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) most of the time, which checks all our compliance boxes.

The colleague sitting right next to me is our AI engineer, so I have been riding shotgun on a lot of what he's been doing, and it seems really innovative so far. We just got a batch of GPUs in to start working with this technology and have hit a few roadblocks, but none of that was Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) related.

For how long I have used the solution, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a ten out of ten overall. My advice to other companies considering it is that, with NASA, we've got operations in space and we have problems all the time. In my experience, it has never been the operating system causing issues; it's always some other component, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been the solid foundation of what we've been building off of. I give this review a rating of ten out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

I am a system administrator using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for handling applications and databases. The machines I manage handle applications and databases, along with some JBoss.

Ever since IBM has come into the picture, Red Hat and Ansible have been developed very well. The reporting and workflows have become very good.

Among all Linux flavors in the market, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has a very high-level support developer team, which is important for our critical systems. We need a solid platform that provides one spot for vulnerability fixes, unlike Ubuntu, CentOS, etc. They only provide low levels of support. 

The management is fine. We're doing regular patches with Satellite. We're happy with it. It is manageable.

We can manage a hybrid cloud environment. Red Hat doesn't come fully into our picture with our environment since we're using the Amazon environment and VMware for virtual machines. Red Hat is just an OS, and it is easy to set it anywhere with no issues. 

They should be more generous in providing documentation in a friendlier way. The Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) documentation is good, yet not as good as other products such as IBM. Oracle, on the other hand, is the worst; they are very limited in sharing their documentation with engineers.

The Asian support could use improvement.

I have total experience in Unix/Linux of 25 years, which includes five years of Solaris, IBM HP-UX, IBM AIX, and HP-UX, along with Sun Solaris, while the other 15 years is with Linux.

We never faced any issues with stability, and we never faced any limitations.

We never faced any issues with scalability, and we never faced any limitations. For our company,  it is more than enough. I'd rate scalability nine or ten out of ten.

Red Hat support is good, actually. It depends on the region. I have dealt with several regions including Asia, Middle East, and Europe. The majority of European support is excellent. I would give it nine to ten out of ten. In the Middle East, it is between seven to eight out of ten, while in Asia, very rarely do we get nine or eight out of ten. I'd rate it five out of ten there.

Positive

We have moved to another technology since we are no longer working with Dell EMC or Networker. With Veeam, we are currently working for that vendor. We are using Veeam exclusively nowadays.

We're working with 80% Linux, 10% Unbuntu, 10% Oracle.

The initial setup was very simple. 

Management is fine, since we have the Red Hat Satellite, which allows us to do regular up-to-date patches. We are happy with the Red Hat Satellite. It is manageable.

I am handling the storage, backup, and operating systems of Linux flavors personally.

This question of ROI would be unfair for me to answer. We are not using the full range of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) products and are depending on other things. However, Ansible is doing very well with the new version, and in terms of workflow, it is easy to manage. Ansible has been performing very well, especially after IBM acquired Red Hat. IBM has enhanced Red Hat and Ansible very well, as they are famous for reporting and managing workflows.

The pricing is very simple. Compared to something like IBM, Red Hat is the cheapest.

Without something to compare it with other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I cannot do a direct comparison. However, compared to Unix products such as Oracle Linux or IBM, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is less expensive.

Regarding Linux Image Builder and system roles, I have tried both, however, cannot recall which one I downloaded. The last time I built it was more than five months ago. 

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) nine out of ten.

Hybrid Cloud

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include maintaining a stack of servers where we perform monitoring, provisioning, certificate provisioning, and checking patch status across the servers.

The most valuable feature within my systems is Satellite. The features that I appreciate most on a daily or on-demand basis are those provided by Satellite. This feature benefits my organization by providing provisioning for every instance, as we have approximately 100 instances under Red Hat and another 20 under Ubuntu. Currently, we use a single user interface to control them all.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could be improved by providing end-to-end support for customers because we are seeing that it is more distributed. For all the Red Hat services, we use Satellite, but other services are on the cloud, and some things are hybrid cloud. This means we have multiple platforms to monitor each time. Another area for improvement is the false positives. We have the Red Hat alarm system, and it is good, but it just fires and reports, sending an email every night for us to check our duties. This is really unpleasant for us.

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

I have experienced downtime, crashes, or performance issues seldomly. It is good and can solve 80% of problems. Sometimes I seek consultants for help to rebuild the model or to see what the root cause is. Sometimes this problem occurs many times, requiring someone to show up and thoroughly investigate it.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales with the growing needs of my organization as it is stable, and I see that with Android development. However, I think it has only increased our usage by 3%. I think it is stable and we will not decommission it, but we still compare the benefits of cloud solutions and the Red Hat solution. I have expanded usage on Red Hat because Ubuntu is an open licensing and very unmanageable, so we are trying to reallocate resources to Red Hat.

I evaluate customer service and technical support as great. My own company has a consultant who is very timely in dedicating support to our services. We can call at any time to seek urgent consultant services. Overall, it is good. We find that rebooting or rebuilding is tough for us. We want to make sure that the service is ready to use, but for some unfortunate situations that happen, we seek 24-hour support to solve the problem as soon as possible. Every second that passes represents a loss for us.

Positive

Prior to adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we were using Ubuntu, and now it depends on what this product and what this pipeline built initially. If they used Ubuntu at the beginning of the startup, we just use it. We make sure they are up, make sure they are stable, and do not care about anything else. If they use Red Hat, we just keep running with it.

I would describe my experience with deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as manageable. It is not out of control. For every server instance, we get notified, and I get an alarm at a very early time, so we can manage to replicate it. This instance has some broken files, which is helpful for the developer to debug and understand it.

When I was deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the deployment, particularly the hotfixes, is a real challenge. We have some big instances with the front-end code and back-end code in one service. We have to do this really quickly to deploy hotfixes and implement new features. We need to make sure that the code is consistent across all the services at that time. We can do the Ansible playbook, which is a very good template that we can reuse to replicate the problem.

I have been involved in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) upgrades or migrations, as for version upgrades, I have been involved. We still have some Red Hat Linux consultants who support us in doing the migration. I think it is helpful. The seamlessness of the process with the consultant depends on the service difficulty because sometimes everything is hard to ensure that it is correct. It depends on the project size.

I do not touch the pricing and the cost of the solution, but I think compared to some cloud costs, it is good because our team is relying on that. We just make sure that the service is up.

The other solutions I considered before selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that in our company, we have two choices: one is Red Hat and one is Ubuntu.

My security requirements and considerations in choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include that this is our manager, and we want to have some endpoints tracking any attack and detecting the status of anything broken. My assessment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s built-in security and compliance features is that right now, I think it is simply risk reduction. I am just maintaining it. For maintaining compliance, I can say that the first priority is to keep it safe. The second priority is to keep it up. We make sure they are okay, available to use, and available to maintain. For any other new features, we do not require that. We just make sure of these two things. Beyond this point, we are seeking some cloud help.

My upgrade and migration plans to stay current with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that we need to upgrade it every year, or just when you have a vulnerability, you need to come up with it and upgrade it. From my perspective, we are not doing really timely upgrading because we do not want to disturb the current pipelines.

For the knowledge base offered by Red Hat, such as the Confluence page, it is helpful. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the knowledge base is helpful. I try to look up and check many of those pages, and they give me detailed ideas on how to implement the system. Sometimes the problem is really unique, and I can get help or try to get support to formalize some questions and help us understand the solutions. I still need to seek a senior consultant's help on migration. Some documentation is outdated.

My advice to other organizations considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that if you use Java, you should use it. If you have many massive servers to maintain, a Red Hat solution with the pipeline and Satellite is beneficial. If you have some old legacy systems, you do not have to set up new labor on monitoring. I give this product an overall rating of 8 out of 10.