Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We use it for 

• some of our websites
• one of our main applications for the City of Gothenburg
• automation 
• the underlying operating system for our GitLab server.

We have many different databases running on RHEL. Among them we have MySQL and POSTGRES and they all run great on RHEL 7 and on RHEL 8.

Using this solution, we can offer our customers an easier way to get a WordPress site, and they can have POSTGRES and Tomcat installations, and these run smoother on Linux than they do on Windows.

We also use both Ansible and Satellite from Red Hat. They are integrated with RHEL and they work like a charm. The integration works great. We use Satellite for patching our RHEL servers and we use Ansible to automate the patching and deployment of config files. That means we don't have to worry that much about the patching. If we want to deploy the same config file to 100 systems, we just run the playbook with Ansible and it's done. We don't have to run it on 100 servers.

The most valuable thing for us is the support that we get from Red Hat for the product. One of our most important applications here in the City of Gothenburg runs on RHEL, so if something happens, we have a partner to get support from.

The solution has features that simplify adoption for non-Linux users. There is an interface that you can activate on RHEL systems, and on other Linux systems as well, so that you will get a graphical user interface instead of just a shell. It's easier for an administrator who is used to only working on Windows.

In terms of the deployment and management interfaces for non-Linux users and Linux beginners, for me it was quite easy to get on with Linux and RHEL. And if you're not using the Cockpit, or graphical interface, then it's a bit harder because then you have to type in everything and you don't get any visual guides. On the RHEL systems that we have, we haven't been using the desktop environment; we only just use the shell environment. But using Cockpit is much easier because then you get a visual, graphical interface.

Sometimes they don't have new versions for applications like Apache or PHP. I understand it's because they have to have support for them, so they can't have the latest version all the time, but that's the main thing I see that could be improved.

So when you use RHEL and you want to install, let's say, Apache or PHP, you do a "dnf install php" and you get a specific version that Red Hat releases. But that isn't the latest version that PHP has released, because Red Hat has to make sure that they can support it. The compatibility with the latest version of Apache or PHP lags because RHEL does not release updates of the latest versions.

It's the same with the kernel. Sometimes they are a bit behind in the kernel version. That's the same issue. They have to test it and support it for so many years so that's why they are a bit behind on the kernel as well.

We've been using Red Hat Linux (RHEL) for more than 10 years. We are using versions 6, 7, and 8.

It's a really stable operating system. It has a lifetime of about ten years per version. It's not like other Linux systems where the lifetime is about five years. It's stable and it runs for a long time so you don't have to change the operating system that often.

It's easy to scale up and scale out.

Of the people using our RHEL systems, some are system administrators and some of them are just consuming power or memory or CPU from the server. They only have websites and they don't come into contact with the underlying operating system.

RHEL accounts for about 10 to 15 percent of our servers. Our usage increases all the time.

The solution also enables you to deploy current applications and emerging workloads across bare-metal, virtualized, hybrid cloud, and multi cloud environments. We only use on-premise in our infrastructure, but you can have it on bare-metal or on cloud or multi cloud. For us, it's been running great. It's reliable.

Red Hat's technical support has been quite good. Sometimes the lead times are a bit long because most of the support is in India, it seems, so there is a time difference. But if we need to get a higher level of support, we can just bump up the priority. So that's really good. We will get help faster.

I don't think our company had a similar solution before RHEL, although that was back before I started with the company. The company started with RHEL because they wanted to have support.

Red Hat, as a company, is a big contributor to the open-source community. That's another one of the reasons that we want to use RHEL the product.

The setup was quite straightforward. It was a bit harder with the latest version, but that was because of our VMware version.

For us, deployment takes about 15 to 20 minutes. Most of the time we get someone who orders it. They want to have a website and they need a server and we will spin up a RHEL server for them in our VMware infrastructure.

For deployment and maintenance there are two of us in the company. I'm one of them, in my role as a systems analyst, and my colleague is an IT strategist, although he mainly works as a system admin as well.

In terms of the solution’s single subscription and install repository for all types of systems, we can have as many RHEL installations as we want because we have a specific subscription that entitles us to have as many RHEL services as we want. We pay for a subscription and with that we get RHEL and Satellite as well.

The best thing to do is to go to developers.redhat.com and get free subscriptions for RHEL products, so you can try them out and see how they work before you go ahead and purchase or subscribe.

As far as I know, there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We have Ubuntu, CentOS, and other types of Linux versions. The main difference between these products and RHEL is the support that we get from Red Hat. RHEL is also more capable and more stable and it is more of a well-tested operating system before it gets released.

Try the product out. If you decide to purchase a subscription, don't be afraid to submit a ticket or a support case to Red Hat, because that's why you pay for a subscription. It took us a  long time before we started to open support cases, because we thought, "Ah, we can fix this ourselves." But now we use the support system quite often and it works quite well.

One of the things I've learned from using RHEL is that there are applications that work so much better on Linux than they do on Windows.

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. 

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.

Red Hat is mission critical to our environment.

Red Hat has improved the mission critical environments running Oracle databases, while CentOS has improved our web environment and MySQL.

Oracle and SAP Environment and all HPC environments.

10 years

No issues

Very stable i don´t find any problem we have many environment using redhat since first version.

Not encountered problem with scalability

The customer service is good and all problem was solved, i dont have any problem

Very good

We have many kinds of the linux version on the all environment but to HPC environment we use Redhat but all another versions work very well

I work with the two scenario

The licensing valor is too high and must be improved

Red Hat is similar to CentOS, except that CentOS doesn't offer to support certain solutions, such as Oracle.

Stable Linux OS. The stability of the OS is very important for the computer system. Unstable means you never know when it will crash or fail while your valuable data and business applications are running.

It's an open source solution.

Many areas in version 5 are obsolete such as filesystem ext2, ext3, while the new versions (v.6, 7) support ext4, Btrfs, ZFS, etc.

10 years.

No.

No.

No technical support.

No.

No.

No more support and licensing.

No.