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reviewer2298879 - PeerSpot reviewer
Data Platform Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Comes with good tech support and security patching feature
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "I don't like the UI changes that come with different versions."

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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

How are customer service and support?

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. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
August 2025
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2025.
867,445 professionals have used our research since 2012.

How was the initial setup?

The product's deployment is straightforward. 

What other advice do I have?

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. 

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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Growth Incubation Leader, Poland and Baltics at IBM
Vendor
Open architecture allows for accelerated growth while secure repositories guarantee stability
Pros and Cons
  • "Open architecture allows for accelerated growth while secure repositories guarantee stability."
  • "Workstations: More applications for graphics."
  • "Servers: More applications for monitoring (e.g., nmon)."

What is our primary use case?

Business: workstation and server.

How has it helped my organization?

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

What is most valuable?

  • Multipath
  • Yum 
  • LVM
  • Selinux

What needs improvement?

Workstations: More applications for graphics.

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

For how long have I used the solution?

More than five years.
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
August 2025
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: August 2025.
867,445 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Software Engineer at a security firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
GUI for network adapters, and built-in tools such as Mozilla browser, are key for us
Pros and Cons
  • "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."
  • "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."
  • "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."

What is most valuable?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

One to three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and technical support?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

How was the initial setup?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
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it_user806466 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Provides a stable version of Linux with enterprise support
Pros and Cons
  • "Enterprise support is available for our customers."

    How has it helped my organization?

    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.

    What is most valuable?

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

    What needs improvement?

    Support.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

    How are customer service and technical support?

    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.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

    How was the initial setup?

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

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

     I was an engineer, never discussed pricing.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    CentOS, Slack, Ubuntu, Arch, LFS.

    What other advice do I have?

    My advice: Kickstart is your friend.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    PeerSpot user
    Storage and VMware Expert at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
    Real User
    It's improved our company's system environments that run Oracle databases.

    What is most valuable?

    Red Hat is mission critical to our environment.

    How has it helped my organization?

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

    What needs improvement?

    Oracle and SAP Environment and all HPC environments.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    10 years

    What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

    No issues

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    Not encountered problem with scalability

    How are customer service and technical support?

    Customer Service:

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

    Technical Support:

    Very good

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    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

    What about the implementation team?

    I work with the two scenario

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    The licensing valor is too high and must be improved

    What other advice do I have?

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

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    it_user715155 - PeerSpot reviewer
    Works at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
    Consultant
    Open source stable Linux OS

    What is most valuable?

    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.

    How has it helped my organization?

    It's an open source solution.

    What needs improvement?

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

    For how long have I used the solution?

    10 years.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    No.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    No.

    How are customer service and technical support?

    No technical support.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    No.

    How was the initial setup?

    No.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    No more support and licensing.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    No.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    PeerSpot user
    Principle consultant at Active Data Consulting Services Pty Ltd
    Real User
    Top 20
    Absolutely rock solid performance, security, stability and reliability.

    What is most valuable?

    Absolutely rock solid performance, security, stability and reliability, essential features for a business that needs to mission critical applications in a 24 x 7 environment.

    Plethora of useful tools and services that just make getting the job done a lot less time consuming.

    How has it helped my organization?

    RedHat Enterprise Linux has been running mission critical systems in my organization now for nearly 8 years, in a 24 x 7 environment.

    During this time we have never, ever had any of our servers fail to function as needed.

    Red Hat Linux has given us five nines (99.999%) uptime for years.

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using Linux in various forms for 10+ years

    What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

    Mainly just the usual issues one will encounter whilst learning the platform, working out the best way to deploy and configure the servers, other than that though, the actual deployments were very straight-forward.

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    None, our RHEL servers have been rock solid.

    What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

    No, we have RHEL servers of varying capacities and workloads, so far it's taken everything we can throw at it.

    How are customer service and technical support?

    Customer Service:

    The technical support subscription is absolutely worth while if you need to use RHEL in production, knowing you can get support if you need it is comforting.

    Technical Support:

    I've lodged a few support tickets over the years and always had prompt, informative responses, I would rate their support as being excellent.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

    We were using an earlier version of HP UX running on PA-RISC architecture, however we became concerned about the cost of remaining on the PA-RISC HP UX platform and possible future issues at virtualization.

    How was the initial setup?

    When setting up any Linux environment, make sure you understand how the LVM works. Other than that it was all fairly straight-forward.

    What about the implementation team?

    It was implemented in-house.

    What was our ROI?

    The uptime and reliability are the main ROI's, the product is also very competitively priced RE: Licensing, so many thousands of dollars in licensing costs alone.

    The ROI on 10 years of rock solid reliability is almost impossible to calculate.

    What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

    In Australia, you need to go through a channel partner, shop around and find a good partner that understands the licensing model well.

    Which other solutions did I evaluate?

    We evaluated HP UX 11.23, which we had been using before hand. However HP (at the time) had not delivered an x86 port of HP UX at the time when we were going to virtualization, so we needed an alternative to HP UX as we could not move into onto VMWare.

    RHEL ticked all the boxes and was support by our technology provider.

    What other advice do I have?

    Well worth a look if you want supported enterprise Linux.

    Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
    PeerSpot user
    reviewer2021031 - PeerSpot reviewer
    Security Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
    Real User
    Supporting OS software with built-in security and encryption that is easy to use and setup
    Pros and Cons
    • "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 cost of this solution could be improved."

    What is our primary use case?

    We use this solution as our operating system.

    How has it helped my organization?

    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.

    What is most valuable?

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

    What needs improvement?

    The cost of this solution could be improved. 

    For how long have I used the solution?

    I have been using this solution for two years. 

    What do I think about the stability of the solution?

    This is a stable solution.

    Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

    What was our ROI?

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

    What other advice do I have?

    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. 

    Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
    PeerSpot user
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
    Updated: August 2025
    Buyer's Guide
    Download our free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.