Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

Our use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is for production applications. 

We are a Managed Service Provider. Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables us not to be worried about vulnerabilities, security, and patching.

The most valuable features are the subscriptions and upgrades. 

We need to have more flexibility on the developed versions. Not everybody is ready to subscribe to enterprise versions. They would like to test the tool without subscriptions. 

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of its security. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux with AWS. We started our practice with AWS, and most customers use it instead of GCP or Azure. We use the product in a hybrid environment, mostly when shifting the containers or existing workloads from legacy systems. 

Most of the customers use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is the only approved OS. The tool's knowledge base is good but is limited to subscriptions. 

The upgrade migration is straightforward. For the initial projects, we used to execute CLI scripts. We plan to upgrade the system if everything works well in the lower environment. 

I have used the image builder feature. I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

My main and only usage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is for the on-premise workload. We use it for running Red Hat Ceph Storage and running automation using Ansible. Other than this, I use it for doing any auto test that I would like to do on a Linux-based machine.

From a security perspective, the most valuable feature is SELinux. SELinux provides good security. It's doing a good job of protecting my real estate.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is great.

It has its own ups and downs. Most of the time, it's pretty stable, but sometimes, you'll find some weird bugs that could affect the availability of your running machine. Red Hat can improve its operating system by making it better from the quality assurance perspective. Users do find bugs, which they, of course, shouldn't encounter. A better QA would probably make the job a lot better. It would make the product a lot more stable than it's today.

I've been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for over three years.

It has its own ups and downs. The operating system itself is pretty much stable, but there could be some bugs that could affect your availability. While running the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, I did experience some bugs from time to time that did affect the availability on my machine.

Overall, it's pretty stable, but when you do something more hardcore or special, then its stability could be affected. I can't recall anything that I faced in the last few weeks or months, but as you go around production with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and have lots of machines running on it, you can get stability issues or kernel issues. A machine might suddenly be rebooted for no reason. That's my experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux's stability.

It's deployed at multiple locations. Approximately, there are 200 people using this solution.

The support in Israel from the guys sitting in Israel is great, but when contacting the support engineers across the globe, the support level just decreases, and the reliability decreases as well. The support guys locally in Israel are great, but the support guys worldwide aren't that reliable. Overall, I'd rate them a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I used Ubuntu and Fedora, but mainly Ubuntu. Ubuntu was a great operating system. We had to change from Ubuntu to Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to subscriptions. The enterprise had more and more need for container orchestration, so we ended up purchasing the Red Hat OpenShift container platform, and the use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the organization grew significantly.

The security features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are aligned with the entire industry. They do not have any higher advantage over other competitors, such as Ubuntu from Canonical, so security-wise, it's okay.

It was pretty much straightforward. Deployment of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system didn't take longer than two days.

It was deployed in-house. Three to four people were involved in its deployment.

In terms of maintenance, it just works unless you do anything special with it.

It's pretty expensive, but I'm not familiar with the pricing of other vendors for their operating systems. I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of pricing.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's main advantage is the support that you get by purchasing their subscriptions. 

We looked at OpenSUSE, but we eventually ended up with Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of the support that Red Hat has in my country. In Israel, Red Hat is a lot bigger than OpenSUSE, so we ended up going with Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of the available support in the country.

If you're evaluating this solution, I'd recommend having your own architects discuss your architecture with the local Red Hat personnel in your state. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a good product, and it could be even better if you know how to integrate it based on the preferences of your organization. So, my advice would be to have your guys discuss your IT architecture with the local Red Hat people and then decide how to specifically integrate your IT infrastructure with the Red Hat software.

Overall, I'd rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a seven out of ten.

Our customers use the product primarily for application servers, authentication apps, and tool servers. If a feature is available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they're most likely using it. The product allows us to use applications that run on open-source software. The product also provides on-site support that helps us if we have any issues.

The solution is stable and reliable. Being able to move back and forth between systems, products, and middleware is a huge boon.

The solution lacks proper documentation. There have been times when I found a document that was supposed to fix an issue, but I realized it was wrong. Then, I would send it to support, and they would fix it.

Our customers have been using the solution for six or seven years.

The product’s stability is good. It has minimal downtime when it comes to generic deployments. Once you start adding complexity, there are other issues.

The product’s scalability is good. Our customers are able to scale out thousands of instances in minimal amounts of time.

The support team is great. I have friends that work on the support side. I can count on one hand the times I've been dissatisfied with support. Usually, when that happens, it's because it's something that either couldn't be fixed or something too old. I rate the support a nine and a half out of ten.

Positive

My involvement in deployment depends on which systems are being deployed. My organization constantly rolls out new systems via OpenStack, on-premise, or other cloud providers. I help build their base images.

The product’s deployment is pretty straightforward. Everything we build is automated and kicked out from there. Once the base image is built, there's really not much to do.

My customers have seen an ROI from the product. They have an on-site support team that is able to help them with issues. It is important to them to have a good team of people to reach back to and to be able to work together.

Our customers conduct market research before any purchase. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has consistently been a top contender for us and our customers. We usually support Red Hat Enterprise Linux because our customers choose it.

The biggest push towards Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the ability to have something that's supported and open-sourced. Having transparency is important to my customers. They want to see what they're putting into production, development, and testing. It is important to the customers to see what's going on and what workloads they're handling and to know that what they're putting the workloads on will be solid and secure.

Our customers use the solution on multiple cloud providers, mostly AWS and Azure. Our customers buy a yearly subscription for some equipment, and for short-lived instances, they do on-demand pricing within the cloud provider to buy the ones they offer.

I believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped our organization avoid cloud vendor lock-in. We've been able to pretty reliably and easily lift, shift and redesign our application from on-prem to the cloud. It might not necessarily be a huge benefit for us. However, it is definitely a perk, especially in an environment where we have to go through a certain purchasing cycle and background reviews for everything. It does end up helping us.

As much as I've used Red Hat Image Builder, I really like it. Though, I've only had to build a handful of images out of it. We can't use something like Fedora, where you've got a nightly update. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is tested and reliable. Having something they can work on, develop, and use daily is helpful to our customers.

The sosreports and soscleaner developed in recent years are a huge improvement. My customers tend to be pretty fixed in their ways and what they use, so they continue to work and use things for longer than they should, but that's the beauty of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is supported, and we still have the necessary reach back.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is pretty solid. It's been tested. It has its upstream counterparts that ensure that most of the bugs get worked out, and what makes it down into the final testing is strong and resilient. We've been working on moving workloads between the cloud and data center with the customers. Instead of lift and shifts, we try to redevelop their applications instead of spending $10,000 to give 32 cores in the cloud because they had 32 cores in the system.

We have a fantastic team that works with us and supports us. The team goes out of its way to help find cost savings for both us and our customers.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We use the product as our server's operating system.

The enterprise support of the product is valuable to us. When stuff gets difficult, it's nice to have somebody to ask about it.

The solution should be updated more with the releases of programming languages. They’re lagging a bit too much. We have a lot of developers complaining about having releases that are too old. For example, if they want Python 3.11, Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports only 3.9. So the product is lagging behind a bit more than our developers would like. 

It would be nice if all the features that are available on the cloud, like Image Builder and Insight, would be available on-prem.

I have been using the solution for five years.

The product is very, very stable and tested. It is like everybody tested everything for five years, and every problem was fixed.

We have never had a problem with the solution’s scalability. We have around 6000 Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers in versions 7, 8, and 9.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a lot better compared to all other products. I rate the support an eight or a nine out of ten. There's too much information on the support page sometimes. If we log in to the support pages and try to find information, it's hard to get what we're searching for.

Positive

We had a lot of different Linux distributions. The pros of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are that it's the same platform for everybody, and it works for everybody. If you need something very special, you might get issues in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but you can work around it. 

The biggest issue with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is mostly the old packages. It is a con if you have something that you know is a bug that hasn't really been released in Red Hat Enterprise Linux but has been released in the other products.

We do a template, and then we just use it. It's quite great.

We take 30 minutes to deploy the solution. It depends on the size of the machine.

I am using versions 7, 8, and 9. By implementing the solution, we wanted a unified server with a baseline platform that everybody uses. We wanted to have just one server that is enterprise ready.

We do not really have compliances in the same way as an American company has. It's nice to have IT security personnel. You get SELinux from the start. However, we get a lot of support cases because of it. The developers face problems with it. So, we get the security, but we also get lots of support cases. Usually, I end up in the middle of that because I work with support.

We run containers on OpenShift. We run only one platform, so portability isn't a concern. We only have Red Hat Enterprise Linux and OpenShift. We don't really need portability since we are government agencies. Nothing else other than on-prem is allowed for us.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extensive. It is a bit hard to find information. However, when you find it, it's good. The packages are a bit old. We have a bit of an issue because of that. But other than that, it's a great operating system.

Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We've implemented OpenShift on top of OpenStack. It's a Red Hat OpenStack environment, which is the virtualization layer, and then OpenShift is for the cloud technologies.

It's currently on-prem on a private cloud. In the future, we might utilize a public cloud if the government approves that. Currently, the banking industry isn't allowed to go to the public cloud.

There is a big move towards digital banking. They prefer to have their solution up and running as soon as possible when the request comes in. They have to have the libraries and all the containers up and running. In a couple of minutes or seconds, they have their whole infrastructure up and running.

With regard to security, most companies are moving towards the black box approach and Red Hat. It's much more secure compared to the other vendors.

There's consistency, and it's resilient as well.

With regards to OpenShift, everything is related to cost. If you need a vanilla OS, you have to spend a lot on the licensing that is tagged. You have to spend on the infrastructure and the licensing on a core basis, and whatever is required on your containers, you just have to give minimum hardware specs.

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization isn't up to the mark as compared to VMware and Hyper-V, but they're moving everything on OpenShift for containers and virtual machines, which is stable. If you go into the virtualization layer, they still need to improve a lot of things, but with regards to OpenShift, containers, Docker, and other things, they are doing well. 

We've been using it for three to four years.

Compared to Windows and other operating systems that I've used, it's stable. 

I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability. We have plans to increase its usage in the future. Our infrastructure will be able to scale. We have a plan to grow it every three years.

Their support is very good. Most of the things are already listed in their knowledge base. Support cases are only raised when you end up with any critical situation. I'd rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We've used Windows, Solaris, and AIX. The reason for switching to it was that everything is moving to the black box. People want everything to be secured. We got a lot of updates on Red Hat, and it was doing very well in the market.

It was very straightforward. When we did the proof of concept, we had everything ready within two or three days, and then the engineers who came to deploy it did it in a day's time once we had all the infrastructure up and running. This was just for the proof of concept.

With regard to the implementation, they had a timeline, and they did deliver before the timeline.

It has been deployed on Nutanix as well. They are present even in the marketplace for AWS. It's a straightforward installation. They have two categories: UPI and IPI, and the installations are very straightforward, but it requires a lot of expertise if you want to deploy it on a public cloud.

It was implemented by Red Hat. In terms of maintenance, it does require maintenance, but once it is highly available, it's easily done.

We've seen an ROI. It has had cost benefits. 

It has saved us money. We did a proof of concept with the VMware Cloud Foundation and OpenShift. We saw the feasibility and how fast it can be deployed. There were a lot of considerations. We evaluated it from all perspectives. Compared to the VMware Cloud Foundation, we noted that it was just 50% of the cost. If you go for VMware, they charge you on a core basis, and the licensing costs are huge. You'll have to spend on Microsoft licensing, and then you'll have to spend on the OS as well. Comparatively, it's much cheaper.

We purchased it directly from Red Hat. Compared to open source, it's very pricey, but you get the support, which makes it much better.

You have to deploy it and evaluate it. You can see that there's a lot of difference compared to other operating systems. It also depends on where exactly you're going. There are mainframes and other different places where you can deploy it. Even on the mainframe, it makes a lot of difference.

With Red Hat, there are a couple of things you need to consider while building your infrastructure. You need to have good hardware, and you need to have a compatibility matrix to be able to have a stable environment. It has to be tested in a proper way, rather than deploying it on any box.

In terms of the golden images created by the image builder tool, we have vendors who come with their solutions. They come with the containers, and they deploy them. Most of them are using GitHub, and we just provide the infrastructure. From a technical perspective, there's a solutions department that's into APIs. They handle everything, and we just provide the infrastructure.

Overall, I'd rate it an eight out of ten. 

In our organization, we use the solution as our internet banking platform.

Some of the solution's features include scalability, lower footprints, and the fact that licenses don't really cost us much. Also, the upgradeability is fantastic. With Windows, you can't upgrade to certain versions. I haven't found that issue with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Working at a bank, I can say that lack of scalability is a big no-no for us since we deal with people's money.

It would have been nice if we had the ability to do updates without rebooting. If we can update certain parts internally without having to remove them from the entire server, that would be fantastic since, else, there will be downtime, and we will need to reboot. We have to schedule downtime. If we can do so, we will patch it and continue running. Even though the downtime is minuscule, having as little as possible downtime could be great.

Speaking about the downtime caused due to the lack of the aforementioned feature, we reboot about 40 servers every time there's a patch, and they're not staged all at once. The whole process will take an hour or so.

I have been using the solution since I started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 7.

Regarding stability, it's good since we haven't had a major outage.

I rate the support an eight out of ten, considering the callback feature and rapid response compared with Windows, where you need to wait for a couple of hours to get support.

With Red Hat, the community is so robust. Most of the time, while waiting for a Red Hat engineer to call us back, the solution to the issue is already provided. This is because it's an open source platform. 

Positive

Previously, we used AIX. Now, we still use CentOS and Rocky for development.

Though the solution is deployed on a hybrid cloud, I would say that ninety-eight percent is on-premises, and two percent is on the cloud.

Also, I am running my workloads and applications on the cloud.

We transferred our license to the cloud because we were originally a VMware on-prem shop. We're transitioning some of our workloads to cloud licensing. Also, I have opted for a subscription. I don't know where we got it from because when I came to the company, it was already in place.

Comparing Red Hat Enterprise Linux to other operating systems, it is a nice solution, especially considering the support we get from Red Hat. Not a con, but on Windows, the GUI or navigation can be a little bit tricky.

By implementing the solution, my organization is trying to solve the agility issue. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are not tied to Windows patches. Windows patches break sometimes, and then the application goes down, which is a big issue. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we have that reliability and robustness.

I am very impressed with the solution's resiliency.

Regarding how easy or difficult it is for us to move workloads between the cloud and our data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I have found it to be very easy.

Regarding portability, it is easy. I was speaking to someone over there who benefits from containers. I mentioned it to my manager, and we are going to have a discussion about it.

In terms of my assessment of the solution's built-in security features when it comes to simplifying your risk reduction and maintaining compliance, I feel it is good. We haven't ever had an issue ever with the solution.

As nothing is perfect, I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.

As a whole, our organization is using it on Bare Metal on-prem and the private cloud, and then also in more than one public cloud environment. We probably have all three cloud providers. We definitely have Azure and Google Cloud. The environment that I support has about 40 apps in one cloud or another, but the organization as a whole definitely has hundreds of apps in Google Cloud or Azure. They're predominantly in Azure. The Google Cloud adoption is pretty recent compared to our Azure utilization.

I'm supporting a capital markets environment. A substantial portion of my environment is still Bare Metal at Colos. I'm sure on the application side, there's plenty of JBoss in our environment. There have been recent conversations around OpenShift on-prem that I'm working on, and our enterprise cloud teams are looking at or are using ARO in the cloud. In the next year, our use of the Ansible Platform will go from zero to full throttle as quickly as we can make that happen. We found the event-driven Ansible very interesting.

They've helped us work on employing technologies suitable to our various use cases. We're pretty slow adapters of containers, but that seems to be changing fairly quickly at the moment. That certainly gives us portability for workloads. They helped us with some aspects there, and they've helped us with a lot of automation conversation at the summit this week as well around Ansible.

When it comes to resilience in terms of disaster recovery, the operating system is robust. If it fails, it's probably an app issue. The majority of work in any of our DR scenarios is dependent on whether we have got cold standby or hot standby. If it's hot, the data replication is already there, and things are already spinning. Maybe it's on or you turn it on. Other times, you may have to start up something. Nearly all of those things are application architecture decisions as opposed to dependencies or things from an OS perspective, but in terms of the ecosystem for managing our Linux environment, using Satellite and so on has been very good.

I prefer it to Windows because of the level of configuration, level of control, and the ability to see the performance of processes on a given system. I prefer the control over logging and the ability that logging gives you to investigate a problem.

Its community is also valuable. It's open source, and Red Hat-supported streams are also valuable.

The level of communication we've got with them is fantastic. 

The integration with the apps and support could be better.

A colleague was talking about having some recommendations for the Ansible Cloud on the console and having some way of identifying your dev or prod path and whether you've got read or execute access to a playbook. There were different things like that, and they made a lot of sense, especially if you're in a dev or prod environment because mistakenly running something in prod would be a huge issue. There could be something that Red Hat configures, or there could be a text field where organizations can add labels to a part of the console to distinguish that for themselves. Those would be things that would be useful. I can't imagine it's hard to implement but being able to know which environment you're in matters a ton.

As a part of my professional career, I've been using it since 2004. I joined my current organization in 2018. It has been almost five years since I've been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the security environment of our organization.

It's stable. We rarely have our systems crashing.

It's pretty easy and getting easier. It's not an OS issue. In terms of scalability, even while running our trading apps, we don't run into limitations related to the OS. Our limitations are more hardware-defined, and even then, we're running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on servers with eighty cores and almost a terabyte of RAM, and the OS doesn't have any issues.

Their knowledge base is great. There are lots of times when we don't even have to open a support case because we find what we're looking for.

I've spent a lot of time with the Red Hat account team over the past nine months. They've helped me understand products. They've helped develop the skills of my team. They've helped us with technology conversations with other parts of my organization. They've been hugely supportive of the technology conversation we're having with other parts of the bank.

They've been over and above the expectations in most cases. I'd rate them a ten out of ten. I don't know if it could be better. It has been extremely good. They've been extremely helpful in reaching out and figuring out what they can contribute. The account manager that they have working with us is a former colleague, so it's a really smart decision because we have a very good relationship with the guy. He knows our environment. It has been extremely positive.

It's a growing relationship with Red Hat. We have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a very long time, and I don't know if we can even compare it to the other OS vendors, but having the account team working with us with that level of experience with our environment helps them work with us. It helps us accomplish what we're trying to do. It has been a very good partnership.

Positive

We get our licenses directly through Red Hat.

We haven't used the image builder tool or insights, but it's something that we might explore in the coming months. 

I'd rate it a ten out of ten. It's very customizable and very supportive. It never seems to crash. There could be better integration with apps, but from an OS perspective, it's excellent.

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for web application support, mainly OpenShift.

Azure is the cloud provider.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easier to manage because it can scale to a large amount and be managed across many platforms. This can lead to cost savings for our organization.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has reduced the amount of management required on the Windows side.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extremely resilient because it is much more secure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's day-to-day functionality is very easy.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped our organization save money by not requiring large-scale virtual machines, resources, or images.

OpenShift is the most valuable feature because it can be used to create applications on the fly.

The UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement.

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

I am impressed with how extremely stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux is.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's scalability is excellent.

Technical support is quick to respond, but sometimes tickets can get stuck in tier one for a while before they are escalated.

Positive

We previously used Windows but switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for cost savings.

The initial setup is straightforward. We can copy and paste any templates we need into the environment.

We have seen a return on our investment simply from receiving timely support when needed.

We purchased the Red Hat Enterprise Linux license via Azure and the vendor.

We evaluated CentOS but ultimately chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of the support.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten.

When evaluating operating system options, keep in mind that Red Hat offers the best support.