Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

I use it for almost everything. I run a company in South Texas and Mexico. We are a cloud service provider, and we have implementations for almost everything. We are using it for websites, virtualization, orchestration, and containers, and we are also using it a lot for telecommunications. We use almost all of its features.

We have many versions. We have versions 8, 9, 9, 9.1, 9.2, etc. 

When we implemented all the security frameworks with RHEL three years ago, that was the first time we had a non-issue audit. It was a great implementation.

It helps with the headcount. With the kind of orchestration and automation that we have, we don't need a lot of engineers. We can have fewer engineers on site.

There is reliability. We can rely not only on their operating system but also on their server. Red Hat not only has operating systems; it also has many different servers.

It helps to achieve security standards certification. It is one of the most important things that I do every single day. We need to comply with a lot of frameworks of security, such as ISO2701, ISO2717, ISO2721, PCI compliance, and HIPAA for the health sector. We also have some local compliance requirements. For example, in Texas, there is one for financial entities, and in Mexico, there are several based on GDPR. It is very important for us.

It is helpful when it comes to building with confidence and ensuring availability across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures. There are many features to ensure or enforce high availability.

It helps us to centralize development with OpenShift. We don't do a lot of DevOps, but we have a supply chain where everything goes to the on-premises cloud, and then it is pulled to the public cloud.

The Red Hat support is most valuable. My team and I are really good at Linux, and we can do almost everything in any kind of Linux solution, but sometimes, we have a really nasty problem, and the Red Hat engineering support at the third level has been fantastic. They know how to fix almost everything. The reason why I pay so much money to them is to have this kind of service and assurance.

Containers are the strongest feature that they have. In terms of the quality, between VMs and containers, Red Hat with OpenShift is fantastic. I have more than a million containers right now in my cloud, and it works fantastically.

Network virtualization resources could be better. When you have any kind of trouble with network virtualization, such as with OVS, which is like a switch in a virtual environment, it takes many hours to find what is happening. Other vendors, such as VMware, and even other Linux implementations for network virtualization have better resources. It is much easier to escalate, and there is better documentation.

I don't use Ceph, which is their software-defined storage, because they don't have the best price. It doesn't make sense when you compare it in terms of the hardware cost, better performance, and better capabilities. That's my main complaint at any meeting with Red Hat. I want to use Red Hat Ceph, but it costs so much money.

I have been using it for about 20 years.

If you have the correct hardware, it is stable, but if you do not, you will have a problem any time soon.

It is reliable. If you don't know how to secure your Linux implementation, Red Hat can do it for you with two or three simple clicks, and you will be very secure without any kind of knowledge.

It is scalable. It is not the most scalable in the Linux area, but for 99% of the companies, it is scalable enough for any kind of workload.

We have plenty of clusters, and we probably have more than 400 servers. We are a private cloud solution provider. We don't have anything in the hyper-scale, such as AWS, Azure, etc. We own everything: the data center servers, racks, networking, and storage. That's our competency, and this way, we can provide a better solution to the kind of customers we are focused on.

We have three different locations: one in the states and two in Mexico. At each location, we have at least three different clusters for three different market verticals. We have one for the financial, one for the healthcare system, which has a lot of compliance requirements, and one for the general public, which doesn't have too much sophistication.

We plan to increase its usage, but it is not my decision. If I sell more, I will buy more.

They are exceptional. We have a lot of experience in these matters. Usually, when we have any kind of issue, it is a really difficult one, and I need to talk to somebody at level two or three in the support area. They skip the line for us because we send everything perfectly documented to open the PR. They put us in touch with the best engineer to solve the issue. If the engineer isn't able to understand what is happening, usually, he calls the RHEL developer or engineer that handles that part of the code. They are usually able to fix a complex problem in less than eight hours.

Their support is fantastic. I have dealt with many different vendors, but Red Hat is the only one that does it in this way. They do it in a simple and fast way. They understand you, and they are willing to help you and fix everything. If you have a problem or situation that is causing downtime for the customer, they understand that it has an impact on your business, and they are affecting the revenue of the company. They are really committed to fixing it as soon as possible. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

We use RHEL and Canonical. We have some SUSE implementation in the Linux area. In hypervisors, we use VMware and Hyper-V. So, we are in many different technologies, and we are not always on RHEL. RHEL has almost 45% of all our hardware. It is the biggest one, but we use almost all the solutions. In terms of security, Red Hat and Canonical have almost the same level of security.

I am no longer involved in its deployment. I last deployed it about four years ago.

In terms of maintenance, every server requires some kind of maintenance, but we have everything automated. We don't put any effort into it. 

We have 8 to 12 people for deployment and maintenance. They handle the deployment and change of the environment in the data center. For DevOps, I have another team of probably 30 people. They develop solutions for customers.

We have definitely seen an ROI. The return on investments comes in the 14th or 15th month.

For the basic operating system, its price is fair. It is not cheap, and it is also not expensive. For the OpenShift or OpenStack implementation, the cost is a little higher than what I would expect, but it is doable. For a storage solution, it is almost impossible to pay.

In comparison to open-source competitors, RHEL has the most cost-effective open-source subscription model. The way I pay for everything, such as Ubuntu or RHEL, is very similar. When you compare how much money I put in for a customer, in terms of licensing, or even support, my margins with RHEL are really good. If I compare it with VMware or Hyper-V, which are not open source, the difference is totally insane.

I am a vendor-agnostic solution provider. If my customer needs something with RHEL or something that's specifically with another vendor, I use that. If they don't know, or there is a new implementation, I surely send everything to the RHEL implementation. In the end, this is not my decision. It is a market decision. If my customer is telling me that they should be on RHEL, I will bring in RHEL for them.

I would advise paying for the enterprise-level support at least for the first year.
For sure, it is expensive, but it would be helpful. With experience, you can downgrade to the second level.

We have had some issues with container compression that broke everything. So, I don't recommend using it if you don't know how to fix everything.

The biggest lesson that I've learned from using this solution is to read before starting the implementation.

I would rate it a 9 out of 10 because there is nothing perfect.

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for running applications and databases on them.

It has a smaller footprint, so it uses less storage. The product is optimized for resource utilization. Patching is very streamlined for the operating system compared to Windows. We prefer using Red Hat Enterprise Linux over Windows whenever we can. Patching is much easier, and it seems more mature. When we apply a patch, we're less likely to have problems after. It's more stable.

All resources should be available on the website.

I have been using the solution for about three years.

I rate the support a nine or nine and a half out of ten. I am not rating support a ten out of ten because if we were able to receive all of the resources that we could from the website, then we wouldn't need to reach out and contact support. It's a learning curve.

Positive

Previously, we used CentOS. We have also used Oracle Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux's kernel. Now, we're strictly trying to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it provides great support.

The products are pretty similar. A lot of the implementations, commands, and updates are very similar. Overall, we've had a more positive experience using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have a basic build routine when building new servers, updating, and installing add-ons. When we run those scripts, it seems like it's so much more streamlined with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It could be because we're converting everything to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We're exploring more automation features. Three years is still relatively new for an operating system for our department. As we explore more automation-rich features and tools and subsets of tools, we'll be able to utilize the solution better. Red Hat Enterprise Linux may be very good at it, but our knowledge and experience are still growing. We need to take a deeper dive into implementing automation.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Microsoft Azure. We did not have concerns about using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud because we had spoken to other customers of Azure that had been running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We can install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our own, or we can use the custom-built Red Hat Enterprise Linux images available through Azure. It makes the deployment of a server much quicker and more efficient.

We have been migrating some workloads and applications from on-premise to Azure. However, we do not constantly move workloads back and forth between Azure. It's more of a one-way migration. We're trying to be less on-premise and more in the cloud. There's definitely a learning curve for the migration. There were some hiccups with learning how to do the migrations. We've done a handful of migrations so far, and each time, we learn from our previous experiences and mistakes. We use our lessons learned and have a better experience each time that we do a migration. It's getting smoother each time.

The knowledge base offered by the product is really good. There are a lot of resources available on the website. We have a direct contact for support, which we utilize on a regular basis. We have enterprise licenses, so we pay for support. We get support whenever we need it. I have been involved in Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades. It's pretty straightforward. We just convert from different Linux operating systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. My technical team has used Red Hat Insights, Image Builder, and Convert2RHEL.

We keep pretty close to the most current versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There are many different versions of the product. Version 9 is the most current. We're trying to stay up with at least one or two versions close to the most current version to stay updated. We don't want to get to a version that would be at the end of its life.

The solution has helped us streamline and optimize our infrastructure for any applications or databases we run on a Linux operating system. They help us save on our physical resources because they're less demanding. Therefore, we don't have to spend as much money on a server that has a lot of CPU and a lot of memory. We can fit many more VMs on a single physical virtualization host because it's optimized. The support is great, and we can find quite a bit of information either directly through the Red Hat website or through the Red Hat community. We're able to do research on our own and find most of the information that we need. If we can't, support will assist us.

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

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 use Red Hat Enterprise Linux to manage our database.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps reduce our risk.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps to maintain compliance by making the data required easily accessible to us.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is good and they provide good training.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles help manage our database.

I use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Web Console and Command Manager. The Web Console helps monitor our database and run queries in Command Manager.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enhances our security.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us meet security standards certification requirements, which is advantageous.

The security of the OS is the most valuable feature.

The labor required to maintain the on-premises storage systems has room for improvement.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux can benefit from more promotions and demos.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for one year.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

We run Red Hat Enterprise Linux in parallel with other OS systems. We are satisfied with how well Red Hat Enterprise Linux works with our other products.

Upgrading the versions is straightforward. All the stakeholders from the system side, database side, and consultants are involved in the updates. 

The cost of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is reasonable. 

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

We have ten people that are using the solution in our organization.

We had a lot of IBM AIX servers. We migrated a lot of them to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have a lot of VMs, and we have a few physical servers. Currently, we are moving all the Red Hat VMs to the cloud. There are 1,600 to 1,700 Red Hat VMs that we are currently running.

The main benefit is that it can be easily recovered and easily restored. It is on the VM. We can easily restore every image that we back up on the VM. If something happens, we can easily fix it. Support and maintenance are easy. The most common issues that happen with Red Hat Enterprise Linux are password restore issues. We can go and restore the passwords through the single-user mode. This feature is well-developed and good.

We are using Ansible for the most automations. We can push everything through Ansible. We are moving towards automation to make sure our system can be easily maintained, and we can recover, restore, and do the things that we want. We have 1,600 to 1,700 servers. We have Ansible Tower, and we have a few satellite servers and a lot of capsules to support Red Hat servers.

If anything is supported by Red Hat Enterprise Linux and the feature is available in Red Hat Satellite, we are able to install it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are using Red Hat Satellite to install all the patches and all the packages, so if a feature is available, we can easily install it if it is supported.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has built-in security features for simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance. We are working with most of the security environments. Security is our main concern. We have zero tolerance when it comes to security. We are able to apply security rules and regulations within the Red Hat environment.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and we normally look at how it can easily support the system. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, we have a high-security system. We have a lot of features there. That is the main thing, but currently, we are moving from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Leapp and Red Hat Insights have been useful. RHEL Web Console is also helpful.

We have access to the Red Hat knowledge base. We have frequent meetings with Red Hat. Red Hat partners provided us with all the information and any kind of training.

We are using the features that are available with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ansible. As such, there are no specific features that we are looking for. 

We have frequent meetings with them. We have had some issues on the application side and the OS side for which we opened cases and discussed those concerns and questions in the meetings offered by Red Hat.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for almost 10 years.

Upgrades and migrations are ongoing processes to stay current. We are a big company. We always have migration going on. We always have the build process. Red Hat's presence keeps increasing in our environment. We are going to have about 2,500 Red Hat Enterprise Linux VMs in the next year.

If there are any concerns, we have a meeting with Red Hat, and they provide the required support. When we have any concerns or questions, they answer them. It is easy. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We have probably seen an ROI. Red Hat is getting better every day. 

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

Internally, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for services and for applications that we run, especially Linux based-applications. We also have SAP solutions, which we sell to the customers as a total solution with Red Hat, SAP HANA, and also for our own cloud-based SAP HANA, which is under Red Hat's operating system.

Red Hat Insights is quite an interesting and valuable feature. Lately, we used the malware scan feature. The Cockpit feature and web interface were quite helpful. We have also begun with OpenSCAP, which used is to harden the operating system's security features.

The first area for improvement is documentation, and I consider it since I have been working in IT for more than twenty-five years. For twenty years, I have been working with open source, and I see that the documentation is lacking, so it needs to do more work on its documentation part. Most open source and upstreams from Red Hat products work from the open source solution and have better documentation than in the actual Red Hat products.

New products need better documentation. The websites also have a single sign-on to get you from one side to the other. As a partner, I had a problem finding out how I needed to connect and to which side of the solution. I consider myself an expert user of the internet and websites, but going from one side to the other, was quite problematic.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud for four to five years at least. My company has a partnership with Red Hat, and so we have our own licensing for the product. We have customers whom we manage, and they purchased the licenses on the go from the cloud provider. We just sold them the managed services. But mostly through us, we should be selling the licenses.

It's a very stable product, and that is actually the reason we are forcing or pushing customers to go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The solution is scalable.

I rate the support a seven out of ten. The support is knowledgeable but slow if we have to get answers.

Neutral

We use Red Hat Satellite for managed services for our customers. And, of course, we use a product of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for servers. We started with OpenShift in the lab at the beginning, but now I'm beginning to produce it for our own services. So, now I can offer these to the customers.

One of the discussions in my company at the beginning of this year was to see if we could test our services on-premises for the virtualization, specifically for the KVM virtualization. But since it was not approved, we'll have to see the next step.

I have worked with other open source distributors. I have worked with SCO-Linux and Unix, which is the base of Linux. I didn't personally make the decision to switch. The company decided to switch since we are partners, and we are focusing on putting in the best efforts in terms of the partnership and customers we have with Red Hat.

The solution is deployed on both on-premises and the cloud. We have customers on the cloud server platform where we run their network, and we manage through Satellite. We also have it on-premises.

I was involved in the deployment of the solution. We created some automation, so the setup phase is straightforward. We use templates for all of those, but to manage the templates, and what it will include, we use external tools to make it easier for the deployment automation.

Regarding deployment time, it can be done in seconds. It also depends on what application we are speaking about since for an OS or more difficult solution, like Red Hat Satellite, you need more time.

I have seen a return on investment, especially considering the time taken to resolve the problem where we bought some support from Red Hat.

Regarding the prices, the new changes are actually not bad as it works for enterprise solutions. But it could have some other options for super solutions for the students in colleges, and they could actually win more customers from that. Of course, we have the test licensing and all that for the partners, where it's very useful for us to be able to test more of the products. But to win more would be much easier for us also if they introduce special pricing for students, universities, governmental institutions and all that. Most probably there is a price for them, but we haven't got that information. Also, Red Hat sometimes goes directly and not through the partner, but I'm not an expert.

I wasn't the one to make a choice, but I think my company evaluated other options, and it was their choice to go with Red Hat.

My company is a private cloud company. Mostly, we have our own private services, providing private cloud services to the customers. But we also provide public clouds like Azure and some Amazon clouds.

Regarding resiliency, it is a good standardized OS with stability. But sometimes, it is a little slow in reaction to problems that might appear. For example, we had this big Java Log4j bug where their reaction was very slow compared to other distributions. Of course, they found the solution when they had it, but it was quite a slow reaction. In general, it's a very stable OS.

Regarding how easy or difficult it is for you to move workloads between the cloud and your data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I don't have any solution for that. I have to migrate it manually right now.

Regarding the cost-saving capability of the solution, I would say that it is possible to save on costs because of the automation we use through Red Hat Satellite for maintenance and how we have managed automation, time to spend on the service, maintenance, test, problems, etc. So, you can say that it's been a cost-saving procedure.

I rate the overall product a seven and a half out of ten.

We're the largest financial institution in Africa, and we use various operating systems and technologies to achieve typical financial service goals. In the past, we were an ION-centric shop. However, in the past decade, we've been increasingly leveraging Linux's agility compared to traditional Unix operating systems. 

Generally, we deploy by cloud, but we use RHEL on-premise in our data centers and prefer SaaS for infrastructure as a service. Our primary cloud providers are AWS and Azure, and we also use smaller third parties for niche environments.

RHEL is spread across virtually all elements of the institution, including headquarters and various locations on multiple continents. In my environment, it is part of a global trading settlement system. 

The rollout for this particular solution was probably about 250 users of the application running on the initial RHEL. We're a global bank, so the user base is much larger worldwide. Users include business and feature analysts, engineers, and project managers. Our infrastructure engineers were the ones pushing for a switch to RHEL, followed immediately by application engineers.

RHEL enabled us to move away from reliance on ION. We're free to choose the best-of-breed solution at any given time while keeping the cloud-agnostic infrastructure at the center of our deployments.

Our operational expenditures decreased, and RHEL made our teams much more flexible. With RHEL, we can have multiple copies of an OS without making annual plans to license and acquire.

The benefits were instant from my team's perspective. For example, we were immediately more flexible and able to scale rapidly. However, if you're looking at it from an executive point of view, the time to value depends mainly on the product and the scale of the endeavor. It might take a few years to reap a return. Ultimately, you will see the financial benefit, but that's somewhat difficult to quantify in the short term. 

I don't think that it's enabled us to centralize development, but it has perhaps increased the breadth of development possible on our applications. In that sense, more development can be centralized on the operating system, but that's more of a byproduct.

We outsource cyber security to other teams, so I can't comment in-depth on RHEL's security features, but I can say it enabled us to understand our security posture more efficiently. This wasn't always possible using an AIX or Solaris in a more centralized fashion. The feature set is maybe not as important as having a single pane of glass and a single configuration to apply across our systems and infrastructure.

RHEL made life a lot easier in terms of compliance because you can more accurately gauge yourself against industry benchmarks with the tools provided and identify your shortcomings. You can interrogate what you've done through research from multiple parties rather than just a single source of truth, which may not be true.

You can compile and run applications on any operating system, but RHEL's advantage is flexibility. It is more supported and supportable in the enterprise sense than Ubuntu or perhaps a smaller distro, but it's also flexible enough to easily transport from platform to platform: ISA to ISA,  production to development, and vice versa. That led me to embrace the switch to RHEL from other operating system variants.

RHEL offers more portability than any other OS flavor apart from perhaps Ubuntu Linux. As a large bank, we run on IBM's architecture. We run Power, Spark, and Oracle x86 across multiple environments. It lets us choose the right environment for the application, which is essential from an operational efficiency perspective. These days, we're all trying to cut heavy infrastructure and move to lightweight agile infrastructure. There isn't a better option in the production world than Red Hat.

There needs to be a broader understanding of the RHEL suite's nuances like how the versioning works and implementing it on various kinds of infrastructure in use across the development landscape. There needs to be more training and education. It's difficult when you have a roadmap to deal with, but it is possible. 

Large application vendors may not have certified RHEL, or they have certified an older version. Most of the large application vendors are unfamiliar with the versioning that RHEL introduced, which I strongly support. They will support a given sub-version up to a point, not realizing that the sub-versions are essentially additive. 

This can be a real frustration when you try to deploy modern infrastructure. It allows tremendous flexibility because we can try things out across the cloud, virtual, and physical, but that's not always where the issue is. It's a matter of educating the engineers and developers on our side or enterprise vendors on the other. 

The licensing could also be simplified. While it makes sense from a theoretical perspective, it's a challenge to explain to the procurement team. Those with some technical expertise can understand how our licensing model works. However, it's still tricky because Red Hat is so different from traditional operating systems. It's another barrier when I'm trying to deploy it in an enterprise environment.

In terms of feature requests, I would point out that our company tends not to operate on the bleeding edge for obvious reasons. We look at what has already been released to define our roadmaps. There's nothing in particular that I would say needs to be included. However, I would like to see Arm playing a more prominent role in the cloud infrastructure and enterprise physical data center spaces. Red Hat supports this, but I haven't seen a clear roadmap for how that support should evolve within the Red Hat operating system environment. 

I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux for more than 10 years.

RHEL's stability is good. 

RHEL is highly scalable and we plan to increase usage. 

I wouldn't rate Red Hat support as less than eight out of ten because I can't think of anything negative to say. I can't think of a time when I haven't been able to get it. Also, because RHEL is global and Linux is open-source, you can typically get the support that you need through research forums and the knowledge base. It's seldom necessary to involve third-tier support within RHEL.

Positive

We still use other operating systems. We've used just about every solution you could name in conjunction with RHEL. We also deploy Ubuntu. In some cases, our application vendor requires us to stick with a given solution. Sometimes it's AIX or Solaris, but mostly we can override that and move to RHEL. Red Hat is now standard for most future enterprise deployments, and we run RHEL on mainframes too, but in a very limited fashion.

The setup was complicated only because the applications we were trying to run were not certified to run on RHEL. It was version 6.8, so we worked with major global vendors to add the certification for the versions we were trying to run. That was the complexity. The application always worked beautifully, and the performance was excellent. It wasn't a question of getting the development to work; obtaining an issue of getting certification for the platform, which is required for any financial institution.

From a development perspective, we proved the concept and ran a mirror of production and development to demonstrate the improvements in OpEx and performance. Getting it up and running in parallel was the key to getting it all to work correctly, and it was instrumental in convincing any dissenting voices of the value. 

The deployment took less than three months, but the certification took nine.
The team supporting the first application numbered around 50, and the small group involved in the initial switch had about eight people.

The entire application is run exclusively on RHEL, so the whole operation team is probably around 40 or 50 people. It's worth adding that our overall group runs about 20,000 servers, so it's challenging to say overall what the RHEL footprint is.

After deployment, RHEL requires maintenance to keep the solution up to date. Security requirements tend to be more prohibitive or less encouraging of change. It's a question of changing mindsets and explaining that something doesn't have to be legacy-tested to update. The security benefits of updating are more critical than testing to ensure the update hasn't introduced more flaws.

I don't have the data, but we have significantly reduced operational expenditures since switching to RHEL. It was a reduction of more than 10 percent. 

The licensing is tricky to understand. Enterprises want to be beyond reproach when it comes to licensing. We would rather over-license than under-license. However, that can be complicated with a high-performance development team who may need multiple operating system instances or want to experiment with spinning up many machines to see if something works or sticks. 

We don't necessarily need support for those. Our procurement team is confused if we need a license for an instance that was only up for 15 minutes on Thursday. We need to make sure that we always have sufficient licenses. That misunderstanding of how cloud development works can sometimes slow down development. It inhibits the growth and success of Red Hat Enterprise Linux globally. So more education around that would be beneficial or at least will provide more clarity.

RHEL's total cost of ownership is difficult to quantify, but it's almost irrelevant. In cases where you don't care, you can always use an open-source OS. In other cases, you need the support and certification that comes with something like RHEL. I do not believe RHEL has any competitors in our use case.

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux nine out of ten. My advice to prospective users is to try RHEL out and see if your application works. In the long run, the benefits will outweigh the time and effort spent migrating. The important thing is to ensure you run programs in parallel so you can accurately evaluate the benefits and make a case for switching.

Our primary use case is to develop the servers and production. It's pretty standard usage. We have some Docker running but I haven't been involved in those environments very often. It's a standard server on minimal load and we're not using a full load with our GUI interface.

We have multiple applications running on both Windows and RHEL. The database systems are mostly MySQL. There's some Oracle but most of it is MySQL. Dealing with Red Hat is pretty straightforward. I haven't run into issues with it. 

When we were running multiple versions of Java, if patches came out for both versions, we would apply the patches for both versions and usually, that could be downloaded. It was pretty simple to update those. Those are systems-supported patches. With the specific application patches, it's a little different. Normally the application administrators take care of those themselves.

If Red Hat's system is set up right, it improves the speed and performance reliability of our hardware because it doesn't use as many resources as a Windows system.

I like the fact that most of the system configuration is Namespace so it's easy to get to and easy to configure, and most of it still uses text documents. Not all of it's a menu-driven-type entry. I also like the fact that it's a very standard file system layout so it's easy to navigate.

In some instances, it provides features that help speed development. In other instances, it's standard amongst most Linux groups. You can download the main features. The file system is always a big difference. You go from a Debian-based system to Red Hat, so the file system layout is a little bit different. User-based files are located versus system-based files. RHEL keeps everything in one area and segregates it. It makes it easier to go between different organizations and still have the same policies and structure. I do like the new package manager.

It's all text-based, all command line, whereas the minimal load does not have a GUI on it. If you're used to using Windows core servers, it wouldn't be that big of a deal, but going from a Windows GUI-based system to an RHEL command-line-based system is a learning curve for most Windows administrators. A lot of strictly Windows administrators don't even want to look at a command line from Red Hat because the commands are so different from what they're used to. There is a learning curve between the two major platforms.

The application and user experience are usually pretty consistent, but that really depends on the application developer. If they're developing an application, it'll be consistent costs on infrastructure. That's not an issue between the different platforms. User experience is based on how the application developer built it. They're not all in-house and so they developed across a consistent platform. They keep everything pretty simple from the user perspective.

It enables us to deploy current applications and merging workloads across physical hardware and VMs. Virtualization and physical hardware stay consistent. Going to the cloud depends on the platform we use but it'll mostly be consistent as well. The RHEL distribution has been implemented pretty well amongst most of our cloud providers. It's pretty standard now, whether we go to Rackspace, Amazon, Azure, or even Microsoft supporting RHEL distribution. You can go to a Microsoft Azure cloud and have a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system running there. The user would probably never notice it.

For Red Hat, the bare metal and virtualized environments are pretty reliable. The only thing I don't like about Red Hat is that every time you do an update, there are patches every month and you have to reboot the system. Fortunately, it's a single reboot versus Microsoft, which likes multiple reboots, but still, you have to reboot the system. You have to reboot the server. The newer updates have kernel patches involved in them. To implement that new kernel, you have to reboot the system, and Red Hat's best policy and best practices are to reboot the system after patching.

I used the AppStream feature a couple of times. Not a whole lot because a lot of our environment is specific to what we deploy. Normally I would just deploy the bare system, adding features requested by the application administrator, and they'll download the rest of the things that they need.

We have used the tracing and monitoring tools in certain instances but not consistently. We use them for troubleshooting but not every day. We use other third-party software to monitor the system logs and alert on the issues. They will run tracing analysis of the systems. The reason we don't always use it is because of the number of servers I have to deal with and the low band power.

Automation is however you set it up. As for running a cloud-based solution, a lot of it would be automated. Going from prior experience, dealing with it before coming to this company, we did a lot of cloud deployment and it's pretty consistent and reliable and you could automate it pretty easily. 

RHEL accelerated the deployment of cloud-based workloads in my previous experiences. Compared to no other solution at all, it's obviously a vast improvement. You have to worry about Windows. As soon as you bring the server up, it requires numerous patches and it'll take several reboots unless you have an image that is very patched and deployable there. Even then, every month you get new patches. Red Hat patches a lot faster than Windows and requires a single reboot. The speed of deployment is a hazard. It's almost twice as fast deploying an RHEL solution as it is a Windows solution.

I'd like to see more of NCurses type menu systems in some instances. We're dealing with SUSE Enterprise Linux, they have an NCurses menu system. It's a menu system. Even some of the higher-end Unix systems like AIX have some inner menu system where all the configuration tools are right there so your administrator doesn't have to jump through multiple directories to configure files if needed. I like the simplicity of Red Hat because it's pretty easy but having an NCurses menu when you have to get something done quickly would be nice.

I started using Red Hat back in 1996. I've been using it for at least 20 years, off and on. I was hired as a Linux administrator for RHEL 6, 7, and 8, and then I changed my job positions. I'm not actively using RHEL right now.

Unfortunately, we're moving away from RHEL to Oracle Enterprise Linux in the next couple of months.

RHEL is a very stable product. It's been around for a long time now. It's been stable since they brought it out as an enterprise environment. It's usually not the bleeding edge of Linux. That just means it has more stability in the packaging and the repositories. They keep the bleeding edge updates and things out of it most of the time, which means if you have new features that you want to implement, you have to do some finagling to get those features in place. But it does mean the system's more stable, for the most part.

It's very scalable. I haven't seen any issues with the scalability of Red Hat. I've used it in environments where we have a few hundred people to a couple of thousand people. I've never seen any issues with scalability. It's one of the big sell points of RHEL. It's as scalable as Unix.

There are around 500 developers who use it. Web-facing interfaces, it's in the thousands.

If you're using a small environment with no more than around 100 to 200 servers, one or two people can handle most of the RHEL stuff pretty quickly.

If it's a larger environment, then you're looking at staff upwards from six to 15, depending on the environment the product's being used for.

There is a system administrator to perform the initial deployment of a server to the maintenance of the server. Then there are the application developers who develop the application, write the applications, and just manage applications. In our environment, we currently have sysadmins who manage the systems. My job is to manage the actual operating system itself. Then, you have application developers, who develop applications for user-facing systems. The application managers manage those applications, not only the developed applications.

It's being used pretty extensively. It's 1,100 to 1,200 servers on one site. 

We're using at least 85-90% of the features of RHEL but we don't really use Ansible that extensively. Red Hat Satellite server we're using as a primary repository in one site. Based on RHEL, we use most of these features.

We are switching to another solution mainly because a number of databases in use are based on that system. They want to expand that database and some other products that come with switching from RHEL to LEL. That's the main reason. As I understand it, the licensing isn't that different with a more centralized approach, so convenience is a large factor.

We switched to RHEL from AIX because of the developer and the cost. AIX is usually implemented on specific hardware. IBM owned the hardware. So the cost for running AIX is a lot more expensive than running an RHEL solution, which can be run on virtual systems as well as physical systems. And x86 servers are a lot cheaper than a power system.

Open-source was also a factor in our decision to switch to RHEL. Open-source has allowed a lot of development in areas, more ingenuity, innovation, and products than other constricted OSs. My opinion is that when you're dealing with open-source, you have people who are more likely to innovate and create new things. It's easier to develop an open-source platform than it is to use a closed source platform because then you can't get to the APIs, you can't do anything in the system if you want to change things in the system to make your product more available to people.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I've even set servers up at home on a pretty regular basis. I have my own lab, so I've deployed it and it's pretty straightforward. With RHEL, the setup is nice because you get a GUI, so any Windows-based user is going to be familiar with the GUI and know what to look at. They can deploy software as needed, right there from the menu. From a TextBase, you can script it to where all you have to do is run a script and it'll deploy the server quickly. It's pretty straightforward.

Personally, I wouldn't be able to speak to the installation. Having a single point is always a benefit because then you don't have to jump around multiple points to download software and to deploy your solution. The only thing about it is with Docker, a lot of times you have to go out to the Docker site to download the newest versions.

If you're running Satellite, it's even easier because all your current patches are downloaded. The iOS is already there and a lot of time is it's a straight script that you can deploy quickly. The single-point install is a good thing.

Depending on what you're running it on and what kind of equipment you're running, it can take anywhere between 20 minutes to an hour. That depends on the equipment.

They had Unix admins on site. They were implemented to bring in the Red Hat environment because of the similarity between Unix and Red Hat.

If you implement Ansible, that's an additional cost. If you implement Satellite, that's an additional cost to your licensing. However, the amount of licensing if you license 100 servers is actually cheaper per server than licensing 50 or 25.

The first one that comes to mind as a real competitor would be SUSE. It's built-in Germany. Ubuntu is a commendable product but I don't find it as reliable or as easy to administer as I do RHEL. A lot of developers like it because it's really easy. It's more geared towards a home-user environment than it is a corporate environment. The support factor for RHEL is good. If you need to call tech support, it's there.

I have used Satellite and Ansible in other environments. Satellite integrates very well. It's built by Red Hat, so it integrates thoroughly and it allows a single point of download for all patches and any software deployments you have. You can automate server builds, if you do it right, and make things a lot easier.

Ansible can tie into Satellite and RHEL fairly easily. It allows you to build multiple types of deployments for multiple solutions, and allows a playbook-type deal. You develop a playbook and send it out and it builds a server for the user. Done.

It would speed up deployment and make it easier to manage. If you had a developer who needed to throw up a box real quick to check something, he could run a playbook, throw up a server and rather quickly do what he needed to do. Then dismiss the server and all resource reviews return back to the YUM. If it was hardware, it would be a little bit different, but if we run a virtualization environment, they return all resources back to the host. So it made matching servers and deployment a lot simpler and less work on the operations environment.

The best advice I could give is if you're going from a Windows environment to an RHEL environment, there's a learning curve that is going to be a factor during implementation management and basic administration. Your company would probably need to hire new people just to support an RHEL environment. Between SUSE and RHEL, the number of people who know SUSE very well in the US is not as high as it is in Europe. RHEL has become more of a global OS than SUSE, though they're both comparable. I would advise looking at what you need it to do and then make sure you have the infrastructure, people, and manpower to support it.

There's a huge number of resources out there. You have sites geared specifically for RHEL administration. I believe IT Central Station has some resources on its site as well. There are Usenet groups and different forums. TechRepublic has a large number of resources as well. There are numerous resources out there to ease the learning curve.

There are a lot of things I've learned over the years using RHEL. Running it as a virtual design environment where you can run multiple servers on a single hardware piece makes it a lot more cost-effective and you don't have the resource depletion as you would have with Windows. Unfortunately, Windows is a resource hog. RHEL can be set up to run very minimally, with virtually no overhead other than the applications you're using to service users. 

I would rate it a nine out of ten.