Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

I use it for running RAID servers, Database clusters, and a lot of other open-source tools. I have also used it as a firewall.

We have on-premises dedicated servers located in some data centers. We also have cloud servers on the public cloud. I am currently using the latest version, and I have also worked on previous versions as well as Template.

Its security is the most valuable. It is very stable and has many features. It also has good performance.

Some of our clients were using Windows servers and products. I suggested Red Hat Linux to them and described the features. They switched to it, and they really loved it. There were around 50 servers in my last company, and they switched all those servers from Windows to Red Hat. I used to manage those servers.

It is mostly better than other solutions. However, it is sometimes difficult for disaster recovery, so we have to plan accordingly.

I have been working on Linux for the past ten years.

Based on my experience, it has been stable. I did not experience any issues.

It is scalable. I scaled it in a way that I put a load balancer and a few servers running behind that. When working with clients, we scale or expand usage based on the need.

I used to work on and manage a website, which was just like YouTube. Around 1,000 users used to use the site, which was definitely putting a load on this server. There were around 30 servers managing the traffic. I could manage 1,000 simultaneous users.

I have never used their support. I just do some research to resolve an issue.

I have also used Ubuntu and CentOS in different companies and for different clients. The utilization of packages, commands, and configuration files are different in Ubuntu. For example, if you want to restart a service, the commands are different in these solutions. They also have different firewalls. Red Hat uses firewalld and Ubuntu uses ufw.

The deployment is actually okay. It is not too easy and not too complex. It is easy for experienced people, but if you don't have the experience, it can be a little hard. 

The deployment duration depends on the type of deployment that we are doing. It could take from a day to a week or two weeks. We can also use Jenkins for auto-deployment.

I worked with a Cloud hosting and deployment company that provided different Cloud services to their clients. They had servers based on Red Hat. It does require regular maintenance. We had a team of ten people.

Red Hat Linux is inexpensive. Linux solutions are generally inexpensive.

I would definitely recommend this solution. It is my most preferred solution. I like using terminals, and with Red Hat, I get to work on terminals and shell commands. It has good security. 

I would rate Red Hat Linux (RHEL) an eight out of ten. I find it excellent, but no system can be 100% perfect.

We need to build a lockdown version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to build our application on top.

It gives us a stable and secure platform on top of which we can build our applications.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. It allows us to do better application isolation using containers. If I want to take a program that runs on my system and put it in its own network namespace, I can put it in a container. I can put a physical interface in with it and run them together in that container.

It definitely makes it easy to go back and look at all the Open CVEs and things like that.

It works well for us in terms of the portability of applications and containers for keeping our organization agile. We are able to do the kind of things we need to do. We are able to modify the system to do whatever we need to do to get where we want to go.

Things like packaging and the stability you get from things being downstream are valuable. A lot of times, upgrades are more security-based and not feature-based, so things do not break API-wise as we go forward a lot of times.

I feel like it is going all over the place now. Sometimes it is hard to figure out what is going on. I would like more guidance.

We definitely spend a lot of time developing on top of things, but I am not sure what on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side can be better.

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

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

It has been great when we needed it. We have not needed a lot of it, but we have had no problems when we needed it. 

Positive

We did not use a similar solution previously. We have only been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We use it on-premises. We use the ISO installer. We install it via CD ROM on-site.

I was not involved in its initial deployment.

It is the guarantee that we are getting the updates that we could backport into the system and we have a stable system to build on.

We have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since I have been with the company. They might have evaluated other solutions before I joined.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would ask, "Why?" We plan to stick with Red Hat as far as we see in the future, and we have no plans to change.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not helped us to centralize development. It is not something we are looking to use it for.

We use Red Hat Insights very little. We work mostly in an offline environment. It is hard to use Red Hat Insights in an offline environment.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the underlying licensing system that our third-party tool uses. It offers convenience. We can open a case when we want to escalate anything. 

The tool's insights included with licensing is good. Security patching is also a good feature for us.

I don't like the UI changes that come with different versions. 

The tool's support is good. Sometimes, support comes from India. I try to wait and ensure remote support is from the US so that it fits the timeline. 

Positive

The product's deployment is straightforward. 

We are a big data shop that has around 700-800 nodes.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Leapp was very helpful. It is very easy to use. 

Our servers run for 500 days, and we reboot them every 600 days. 

I search through Red Hat Enterprise Linux's knowledge base daily. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 since the third-party tool is compatible with it. 

We use satellites for the operating system and Ansible to do the configuration. 

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

We use this solution as our operating system.

The security, ongoing support, and ease of taking a system and getting authorization from a government agency have helped the way our organization functions.

The built-in security features support certain security standards such as encryption. It is simpler to meet FIPS 140 encryption requirements such as the ATOs.

The ease of use of this solution has been most valuable. 

The cost of this solution could be improved. 

I have been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution.

We previously used Linux. Red Hat meets our needs more comprehensively.

Our main ROI is in the ability to readily get ATOs.

For somebody familiar with the Linux platform, it is not difficult to troubleshoot when using this solution.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

Typically, we use this solution as a base to create and secure container images. Sometimes we use SELinux through RHEL and sometimes we only use RHEL. It is easier to apply STIG baselines to a RHEL system than other systems. We mainly use it for building and securing containers.

RHEL is different than any other Linux distribution folder. Folder locations are different and using this solution makes us more secure.

We are assured of added security because of the STIGs, automation and all the repositories that exist for securing Red Hat and SELinux. We have scripts that can automate the STIGing out of an RHEL machine, RHEL container or an RHEL BM.

It is also easy to troubleshoot using RHEL and follow the same process as other solutions such as Ubuntu, Debian, or Arch.

RHEL's effect on our organization's management and efficiency is noticeable because we check all the compliance boxes when we run STIG machines. It helps us because Red Hat is trusted in the governmental space. It also helps management save people's time by just having use of templated containers.

There's a lot more automation for STIGing out a Red Hat machine than there is in a Ubuntu or a Debian machine and this is one of the most valuable features. 

Since it's based off Fedora, I don't like the DNF package manager. 

I have been using this solution for six months. 

It's very stable. I've never had any breaking issues when upgrading packages or versions. 

We run this solution on a really small scale. We are a development group so we're not working on large-scale systems. We generate proof of concepts and then show that to the company for them to use so I can't really speak to how it scales.

Red Hat's tech support and customer service are really good. The Red Hat team are my favorite people to work with. They are easy to work with and genuinely care. I would rate them a nine out of ten. 

Positive

The initial setup is mostly straightforward depending on the specific setup. We build our own containers and that is more complex but there are simplex supported setups. In both scenarios, maintenance only involves a few commands and is simple. It is maintained by two security engineers. 

From an ROI perspective, this solution helps us win contracts. Contract values are negligible to what the RHEL licensing cost is. It has a really large effect on our contract deals because it gives our work and service credibility.

I would advise others to read up on the solution first. Try Fedora first before you get into Red Hat. There are some similarities and a lot of what you know about Linux transfers over. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

Business: workstation and server.

Open architecture allows for accelerated growth while secure repositories guarantee stability.

• Multipath
• Yum 
• LVM
• Selinux

Workstations: More applications for graphics.

Servers: More applications for monitoring (e.g., nmon).

The GUI for network adapters and built-in tools provided by RHEL, such as the Mozilla browser, have been valuable. Since they come built-in, it saves the time of having to install them, and you have everything necessary with the installation itself.

There are several tools which Red Hat provides as add-ons such as ReaR (Relax and Recover) which can be used for disaster recovery.

Improvements are necessary to stay in the market and face the competition. I really think that the upgrade policies between the major versions, like from from RHEL 5 to RHEL 6, should be much easier, similar to what is in place for upgrading from RHEL 6 to RHEL 6.8.

Until now, RHEL has been the most stable OS I have ever seen. Nothing seems to break, with frequent updates. I have been running it 24/7 for the past 18 months and it runs flawlessly.

No issues so far. You can always scale the hard disk as much as you want, add NFS, CIFS disks and still the enterprise solution would run seamlessly.

I would rate technical support at eight out of ten. Though they have some excellent engineers available, the case mostly goes through level-3 support staff and then it moves forward. This can sometimes be a time consuming process and lethal for a company.

No, we did not use a previous solution. We knew about Red Hat from our inception. It was a pretty well-known enterprise platform.

The setup of RHEL is straightforward, there is nothing complex about it. Everything is well documented on their website.

The pricing is a bit on the expensive side, mainly because of the support they provide. However, it is quite affordable if you are an organization. If, as a small company or individual, this is an expensive option, I would recommend CentOS, which is an exact replica of RHEL, minus the customer support.

I have worked on a few Linux platforms, but Red Hat is a different experience. Due to its stability, it makes an excellent choice. It’s so-called invincible security makes sure that your data remains safe. The excellent customer service support agents are ready to get your problem resolved almost within an hour of opening a case (as long as you have the premium license for your servers). Taking all this into consideration, I would say this solution is a nine out of 10.

I have been working on Red-hat for two years and I must say I enjoy working with it. No day is like another, since there will always be something which will enhance your learning curve.

I would say if you are managing high-end servers running complex programs, Red Hat would never do you wrong. It has a lot of built-in tools if you choose the maximalist installation. If you are running a low-end server, you can even go with the minimalist installation which would only cramp a few megabytes of your processor power.

The company that I worked for that employed RHEL was a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System - think of an image repository for x-ray, CAT scan, MRI, etc., that allowed radiologists to read the images and report on their findings). Our software was a FDA-certified medical "device," based on an open-source DICOM toolkit. We had a custom repository that served up our packages. We needed a stable, supported version of Linux since we would have to get FDA certification for each major version upgrade.

Enterprise support is available for our customers. Pre-RHEL, I used Red Hat desktop for personal PC.

Support.

Rarely were there stability issues. We regularly had servers running for three years without reboot.

Yes, there were scalability issues, but I blame that more on my employer than on Red Hat.

Support seemed to be great for day-to-day issues that our customers would experience (the customer would engage Red Hat support and escalate to me if there was no resolution). I only had to engage support once for an escalated issue and their support team tried to pass the blame onto our Hypervisor vendor, when it was indeed an issue with a Red Hat package.

I have used lots of flavors of Linux going back to 1995. Enterprise support was the reason Red Hat was selected.

Easy. Used Kickstart to automate installation and post install config.

 I was an engineer, never discussed pricing.

CentOS, Slack, Ubuntu, Arch, LFS.

My advice: Kickstart is your friend.