Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We have Ansible deployed on our Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. We use it to manage the security of our fleet of Ubuntu virtual machines.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is way ahead of Ubuntu in terms of security and compliance. It is mainly the ecosystem of data science tools that our developers want that pushes us in that direction. As a security engineer, I have a lot more peace at night knowing that my Red Hat servers are doing a good job keeping our Ansible infrastructure safe because that has fingers into everything we do. It is pretty critical.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not affected our system's uptime in any particularly noticeable way.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not enabled us to achieve security standards certification because we do not have any yet. We will have them hopefully in the future.

There are some nice integrations with scanning for vulnerabilities. That is the feature I have enjoyed the most because I am a security person, and that is my bread and butter.

Ansible has certainly been a game-changer. It is a lot easier to keep a whole bunch of virtual machines consistent with each other and make a change consistently across all of them. We use them for data science activities. Our data scientists are constantly trying out new packages and downloading new tools. We have to enable them to have root access on their machines but also need to ensure that they are not doing anything stupid at the same time. There are competitors to Ansible, but we are a big Python shop, so it is a very comfortable environment for us.

The only issue we have had with it is around the SELinux configuration because the way Ansible installs, it sticks the platform passwords in a flat file. We want that locked down more strongly than what is there currently with SELinux. 

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

I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

Primarily, we have used Ubuntu. We have had some of our use cases on CentOS, and then, of course, our workstations are all Windows, but I wish they were not.

We chose Ansible, and that chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for us.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud. We have Azure because it is the corporate standard. We do not have any concerns about using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud. Obviously, everything in the cloud is more exposed than everything on-prem, but it has got good, sensible, and secure defaults built in, so there are no concerns there.

In terms of Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades, when we upgraded Ansible this fall, that pushed us from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. It should be a little easier from now on. Now that we have made the big jump from the older Ansible to AAP, we will probably be upgrading the systems on a quarterly basis.

We probably have not yet seen an ROI. We purchased it a couple of years ago, but we have not had the time to put it to as much use as we wanted to put it to. The cost is low, so it would not take very long to reach a return on investment.

We have not made use of the Committed Spend.

For its use case, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.

I am primarily doing developer enablement for users of Red Hat-based software stacks. Most of my experience for the last five years will be in the context of AWS and Azure. As my customers are primarily cloud-based, they are primarily using the Red Hat repositories hosted with Amazon and Azure.

My customers are primarily DoD, so they are using EL7. We are trying to get them to move in the direction of EL8, but it is a slog.

As an industry recognized platform, and the fact that Red Hat goes to great lengths to get their stuff security accredited, it makes it a lot easier for me to get applications put into production since I can point my customer security people at the work that Red Hat has done upstream. Then, all I have to do is account for the deltas associated with the specific deployment in their environment. It greatly reduces the workload when you can get it down to just deltas.

Automation is the most valuable feature. I don't like having to solve a problem more than once. If I can just whip up some code to take care of deploying something, responding to something, etc., then that is what I prefer. It is a lot easier out-of-the-box to do than it is with Windows. With Windows, there is always the process of bootstrapping into being able to have the automation framework available, then making the automation framework work.

In the AWS space, the cloud network is packaged. Tools, such as Ansible, Puppet, and SaltStack, are all easily found and installed. That is quite helpful.

The integrated solution approach makes it a lot easier to deliver things on an infrastructure as code basis. So, if customers need something deployed, I can just do a set of automation for them. This gives them an easy button to take care of the rest of their solution, whether that be deployment or lifecycle maintenance of a deployment.

I use their tracing and monitoring tools on an as needed basis.

It is great for the stuff that Red Hat either owns outright or is the lead on the upstream product. When it comes to third-party tools, it can be a little iffy. Some of the database solutions and data governance solutions that I have had to implement on Red Hat have not been fun.

I would mostly like to see improvement around corporate messaging. When Red Hat 8 came out, and Red Hat decided to change, it inverted the relationship between Red Hat and CentOS. This caused my customers who had a CentOS to RHEL development to production workflow quite a bit of heartburn that several of them are still working out. A lot of that probably could have been avoided through better messaging. 

I have been using it for a couple of decades.

This is a double-edged sword. From a stability standpoint, it is great. From a facilitating development, at least up through Red Hat 7, it was problematic. If you wanted the latest and greatest version of Python, Java, or any given development language that your developer community wanted to use, then your choices were package it yourself or use SCL. Packaging it yourself was flexible, but then it caused auditability problems for your information assurance folks. Going the SCL route was good, but activating it in a way that developers were comfortable with was problematic. It looks like the AppStream capability in EL8 will ease some of that. However, I haven't had enough customers using EL8 yet to verify whether what seems more usable to me will be more usable for them.

So far, I haven't found anything that inhibits scalability. The only thing that I run into is probably more a side effect of how my customers use things than Red Hat itself, in so much as my customers tend to prefer to implement things in a way where it is a bit of a heavier weight than they absolutely need. This slows down the speed at which one can deploy. However, this is more of a customer issue than a Red Hat issue.

RHEL is the basis of all my customers' cloud and container solutions. 

I have worked with Red Hat technical support minimally. Most of my customers operate in the DoD and the intelligence community. Much of their stuff isn't really able to be supported because you can't export logs or anything like that. At best, things are indirect. The things that I tend to seek assistance for are fairly edge case problems. Then, it is a case of needing to work through the process to get to the backline engineers. Every time I do that, it is not a quick process.

When I get to the part of the support system that I actually need to be at, then I would probably rate support as 10 out of 10. Getting to that point in the support resources is about five out of 10. Overall, I would rate it as six or seven out of 10.

Neutral

I automate everything. I write the automation that creates the VM templates. Once my automation is done, there is really nothing to set up.

Operating in the cloud space, we typically point our customers to pay-as-you-go licensing, which comes through the various cloud providers repository services.

I have experience with probably two dozen different Unix-type operating systems. However, 2010 would have been the last time I touched something other than Linux and 90% of that would be Red Hat.

For anyone who is doing physical or on-premises virtual, I would probably point them at Satellite, and if they can afford it, as an enterprise license. This is just so that they don't have to deal with picky unit licensing concerns. However, for people who are fully cloudy, I would tend to push them more towards using the RHEL solution.

Some of my customers use OpenShift, many of my customers use Ansible, and a lot of them use a local Docker and Podman. The ones that actually run within Red Hat integrate just fine. The ones that Red Hat runs on top of, those are a little more difficult to speak to. Running Docker inside of RHEL is easy. It is much better on EL8 than it is on EL7.

I like it enough that I use it as my own operating system for my personal web and mail server. So, I would rate it as eight or nine out of 10. The primary hits against it are that if you want to do anything bleeding edge, the pursuit of stability works counter to that.

Our use case is mostly for application servers. We are not really using it for any of our file servers. We have a storage department who usually just deals with NAS and things like that. However, this solution is primarily for application servers.

The biggest benefit is from a security standpoint. As the product progresses and they come up with new versions, the new security features are addressing vulnerabilities. From that perspective, it has worked well.

We use Red Hat Satellite. The integration between Satellite and RHEL works well. Satellite is mostly used to manage the repositories from a secure standpoint. We also use IBM, which is for identity management and user access, and that also works well. From an operational standpoint, it works great. We are able to manage user access with IBM, and there has not been an issue. We make role and user groups as well as host groups so different groups have access to different servers, for whichever servers are in different host groups. For example, the database team may have a user group who has access to all the database servers listed in a host group. So, the access works well.

The best feature is its dependability. We have had some situations where some RHEL servers have been up and running for five years. So, it provides reliability and dependability. It stays up.

It provides flexibility for us to come up with solutions to speed up deployment, which is great. It allows us to use it in different environments and works well with different applications. For our virtualization platform, we will just probably deploy through VMware. We are able to script and code all of the hardening procedures. If we wanted certain applications installed for deploying images, it just gives us the flexibility.

The deployment and management interfaces for non-Linux users and Linux beginners are pretty robust. It works pretty well. I know the servers themselves have a UI that is a management front-end, where you can basically do everything using the UI rather than doing anything with the command line. That is definitely good for non-Linux users and Linux beginners.

The consistency of application and user experience, regardless of the underlying infrastructure, is great. It works well. The more that they add to make it a little simpler to work with the tools and applications that they provide, the better.

The solution enables me to deploy current applications and emerging workloads across bare-metal, virtualized, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments. If it was a scale of one to 10, 10 being the best, I would say nine because there is always room for improvement. It is definitely up there as far as its reliability.

In the past and with older versions, you couldn't expand the root file system without rebooting the server or restarting the operating system. That is something that they have actually corrected now, which is great. They corrected that issue somewhere around RHEL 7. 

Since 2005, I have worked at various companies who have used this solution.

My current company was using it even before I came.

Once it is up and running, it is solid and stable. It has a stable OS. I haven't had any issues with it.

Usually, if there is any particular issue and it gets to a point where we need to open a ticket, then we will open a ticket and just generate a dump file. We then upload it and wait for them to respond.

The technical support has been great and awesome. They have been able to assist, provide solutions, and root cause analysis for different issues. I would rate the technical support as nine out of 10. There is always room for improvement.

Positive

Before 2005, I worked as a Unix engineer for Solaris and Sun Microsystems. Once I left that company who was working with Solaris, that is when I started being more like an administrator for Red Hat Linux for different companies.

Most companies go with some sort of way to deploy an image. I have done standard, straight installs, installing the solution to laptops. That would be the equivalent of installing it to bare-metal.

It takes maybe 15 to 20 minutes to deploy a server. That is just with all the automation that we have added as well as having to deploy a base OS image, hardening, and adding all the software that we want. For a company-base installation, it takes about 20 minutes.

This solution is definitely one of the best versions of Linux out there to use, especially if you are looking to use Linux in an Enterprise fashion. This is mainly because it has the best support out there. It is also stable and dependable.

We use outside monitoring tools, not the ones that come with RHEL.

We are using other tools to deploy base images to our private cloud. So, we're not exactly using Red Hat tools for this use case.

They are a great company overall. It is hard to say where they could improve. They have user groups. They put out a lot of messaging and information. The solution is easy to learn and get to know their products and what they do. From a personal standpoint, I have everything that I need.

If I wanted to run multiple versions of Node.js, there are ways to do that without using AppStream. More recently, I have been working with different versions of Node.js, having it in different versions on one machine. It works well. Just the fact that I have the capability is great.

Among the other distributions of Linux out there, I would rate it as 10 out of 10. If I have to compare this solution against everything else out there, this solution is at the top of the list.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our applications. I use it for many applications, especially SAP.

We install it on the server so that we can install our applications running on that server.

The benefits I get from this operating system are that it's secure, easy to use, and stable.

I find the clustering feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux the most useful. It helps us to cluster our application service to maintain high availability.

I access the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux through their websites. The knowledge base is helpful to me.

The Image Builder is easy to set up, and overall, it is helpful to me.

I recommend that they improve their virtualization product, specifically the management console.

Support should definitely be improved.

I do not have any complaints with the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in multiple locations. We are using it in the IT industry.

I would rate their support a three out of ten. I find them slow to respond. The quality of support is not acceptable in the way they provide solutions.

Negative

I manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems by installing it from the disk, specifically from a CD-ROM. It requires maintenance from our side. We have 11 people for maintenance in the team.

I have not seen a return on investment since I started using it. The cost is a reason for that.

I find the cost of this solution expensive.

I would recommend not using Red Hat Enterprise Linux because there are better products out there. I prefer SUSE because of the cost and other features.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux as four out of ten.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to its robust security features, which are essential for securing e-commerce transactions and monitoring our Linux servers. Additionally, its flexibility allows for deployment across a range of devices, including HPE and Dell.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers robust provisioning and patching management capabilities, ensuring efficient system administration and security.

I am delighted with Red Hat Insights and recommend this feature to others.

Since using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I have found it to be very secure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has reduced our downtime by about 60 percent.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux aids in achieving security standard certifications by providing a secure foundation and tools for compliance with various security frameworks.

The most valuable aspects of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are its flexibility and security. It allows us to manage servers independently and ensures security for any device used.

The system roles feature is good.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers robust security features, continuous improvement is crucial to ensure a secure environment and prevent potential losses.

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

I rate the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as seven point five because sometimes it takes time to reach support for assistance.

I rate the scalability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as eight. It is satisfactory in terms of scalability.

The response time could be improved as sometimes it takes too long to reach out to them.

Positive

The complexity of deployment can vary based on familiarity with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I found it to be complex.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be expensive, but its cost is not a deterrent for many organizations willing to invest in its stability, security, and support ecosystem.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight out of ten.

We have 80 percent of our environment using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. A team of around 40 uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux to manage over 3,000 servers in a big environment.

We perform weekly maintenance on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We do updates, upgrades, and migrations on our Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.

Based on my experience, I recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux, particularly to those seeking a highly secure operating system.

The primary use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is automation. We have Ansible running on some Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers, and a lot of it is geared towards automation. We have the automation of processes like patching, upgrades, OS enhancements, or OS upgrades. Additionally, our stores run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is pretty secure, but we rely on our network products to handle a lot of our security. We have Cisco products. These servers that we are currently running are not necessarily tightened down on the ports, traffic, etc. We rely on Cisco firewalling to handle a lot of the traffic, load balancing, and so forth. I have not configured a lot of security per se right on the server itself at a kernel level.

I like the knowledge base. They have a pretty good knowledge base portal. On their website, they have a lot of great classes. I do appreciate doing that. I have taken several myself, so I am pretty impressed by that.

We use Ansible Playbooks for patching our devices, especially those that are out in the field. We are using Ansible Playbooks to handle patching. We are using the systemctl command that goes into the repos to grab whatever patches we need. So far, the management experience has been good.

I have used a lot of different Linux distributions, and one thing that I like about Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the support. The support from Red Hat is very good. They offer excellent customer and vendor support. 

The ease of training is great, and I appreciate products like Ansible Tower. 

Its interface is good. It is a very solid operating system.

Some of the documentation that I have run into or encountered appeared to be a bit outdated. That would be an area for improvement.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since early 2000. It has been about 20 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very stable. I have not experienced any instances of crashing with the Red Hat servers that I have worked on.

Other than the issues with the legacy software or some of the IBM AS/400 that we tried to add to it, it has been pretty seamless. Building them out and migration to the data center or the VMware environment has been pretty seamless. 

Customer service is great. We use a support portal to open a ticket, and the response time is good. We usually get an email response or an update to the ticketing system, and then if necessary, we get a callback within four hours. The response time also depends on the priority. If we are looking at a massive data center outage, I am sure it is a priority one. Most of the tickets I submitted took one to four hours.

Positive

I have used SUSE in the past. They have a pretty good support system. They have got a good OS. I am not sure what the market share is for those guys, but they are pretty good.

Our environment is a combination of the cloud and on-premises, but we primarily use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-prem. We have a few development test servers running on Azure. They are not used in production. They are just for testing.

I was involved with the migration from SUSE to Red Hat, but that was close to a decade ago.

From what I recall, the initial setup was not that difficult. We did have some engineers from Red Hat who came out to help us. It would have been more difficult if we did not have them there, but from my recollection, it was not very challenging or difficult. We were able to get that done pretty quickly. There were some issues with legacy software, but those applications were built on the Windows platform. They were a little bit of a mess. Other than that, it appeared to go pretty smoothly for us.

It does not require much maintenance. Other than patching and keeping up with bulletins as to what might be out there, there is not much. There is not a huge amount of maintenance. They run pretty solidly. The uptime is great. I do not have to restart a lot of these servers. I might have to restart a service here and there, but nothing that I can remember.

We had help from Red Hat engineers during the implementation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a much more secure and stable system than Windows infrastructure, and the support is also great. Of course, you pay for the support.

We were able to see its benefits after some time. Some of the returns are seen after a while, not immediately. Sometimes, migrations might be difficult to do if you are running legacy software.

I am not involved in the budgetary aspect, but from what I understand, the pricing is competitive, similar to what we paid for SUSE.

Having a solid foundation in Linux can be very helpful. Learn as much as possible. Automation has become a very important part of the industry now. Learning how to automate with Ansible, Kubernetes, Docker, and Python along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux should set you up for success.

We have not tried Red Hat Enterprise Linux Image Builder or System Roles. Image Builder sounds good, but I have not tried Image Builder. We build our images from vCenter. Image Builder would definitely be something to check out.

Using it in a hybrid environment is a very interesting concept, where we keep some of the hardware and applications on-prem and then maybe rely on Red Hat to handle some of the networking or other configurations externally. I would like to try that hybrid approach.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten.

We have extensive contracts with Red Hat. We have it for the operating system. I manage the cloud deployment for GCP, and we have got Red Hat Satellite running in GCP. All of our VMs run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud. On-prem, we are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our OpenShift cluster, and we have a supercomputer that has got 753 nodes with 50,000 cores running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We use a lot of the other products too.

There is consistency across the deployment. Generally, when you are looking to hire people, if you hire people who know Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they have a certain level of understanding that goes along with using the operating system.

It is easy to secure. It has a lot of built-in security features, and it is very stable, which is a big deal.

It makes it easier to have one team that deals with both on-prem and cloud because there is a uniform operating system and tooling. You do not have to have a set of admins where one knows one thing and the other one knows another.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development. We are using the same platform everywhere. It is the same tooling, and everyone is working in the same system.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. We are building out OpenShift on-prem right now on bare metal. We are running the hub cluster from GCP to spin up the bare metal cluster on-prem. We will hopefully be moving more and more things towards containerized workflows. We are running OpenShift, so it all runs on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

For security, SELinux is built in. It is out of the box. It is built towards building a secure system. We are in the process of working on compliance and getting this 800-171 certified. That is in process. They have regular security updates and lots of tools for rolling out updates. In that sense, there is a continuous upgrade path that is well-worn and fairly easy to maintain.

In terms of portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for keeping our organization agile, when it is in a container, it does not matter if you are running a UBI container or some other sort of container. If you have an environment that will run a container, you can throw a container in it, and it will run, so the portability does not belong to the OS at that point. It belongs to the containerization system.

It is consistent. It is geared toward security. I am used to it. I know only Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I do not know Ubuntu or any of the other flavors of Linux.

It is good. I do not have anything to improve for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but CentOS could be open-source again.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2014. I have been using Red Hat since 1.2. It was probably 1998.

It is very stable.

We have a cluster with 50,000 cores. It is pretty scalable.

Their customer service is good. We have a TAM. Our TAM is great. Without a TAM, it is hard to get new tickets through.

I have used many solutions. I have used many that predate Linux. For Linux, I have run Slackware, but that is just for fun. Professionally, it has all been Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

Our deployment experience is good. For the things in the cloud, I use Satellite. I build images and deploy from images to the cloud. It is a mutable deployment chain rather than a standard upgrade path.

We deploy it in-house.

The vendor management takes care of that. 

We have an enterprise agreement. From our department's standpoint, everything gets rolled into the enterprise agreement, which is great because we never see it.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would say, "Why would you look at something other than that?" I have built things on Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I was out of the industry for a while, and I came back, and I focused on Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it pays better. There are more standardized jobs in the area if you know Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The certification that you get from Red Hat means something quite specific.

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

We are deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our primary Linux OS, and we are using Ansible for some automation initiatives. Our use cases are around centralization.

We have a supported product. We are at the beginning of building a relationship with Red Hat similar to the one we have with Microsoft, Cisco, and others. It is to standardize the quality, supported version, and company. I am leading this project, and I believe Red Hat is the one.

We have built a hybrid environment. Most of it is on-prem, but we also have Azure, so we have both cloud and on-prem environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is helpful for patch and vulnerability management. There have been a lot of security initiatives around Windows and tightening it up, but our Linux environment was not standardized. Red Hat Enterprise Linux standardizes it. With the combination of Insights, it aligns with Windows and other security initiatives.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not yet enabled us to centralize development. It is too early for that. I am not very familiar with OpenShift, but with OpenShift, Kubernetes containers, and some of those capabilities, DevOps will become more integrated with Red Hat and its products in the future.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s built-in security features seem very good when it comes to risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance. One thing that helps is the catalog of preexisting playbooks provided by Red Hat around security. It helps you ramp up on security. It aligns it with what an IT person on the Windows side already knows to look for, such as firewalls, setting up permissions, etc. They have playbooks for Active Directory integration, security initiatives, and limiting the firewall. Building out some of the playbooks that Red Hat has in those areas was helpful in getting a good security posture for those systems.

Ansible is going to make the portability of applications and containers happen for us. The OS is important, but our ability to use Ansible and deploy via a cloud or automate via a cloud or on-prem would accomplish that.

Red Hat Insights is valuable. There is patch and vulnerability management. It is similar to what you would see with SCCM. I have a single pane of glass interface. I can approve the patches and vulnerabilities, and hopefully, between Satellite and Ansible, we can automate that process.

I am looking for training. I am a Windows guy who accidentally became a Linux guy. You volunteer a few times, and you are the guy. Right now, I am looking for training and ramping up to be able to support their products, so professional services are key. There are things like Lightspeed with IBM Watson. I do not know YAML very well, so it is going to be integral for me to create playbooks at the very beginning and be able to use the AI tools. If I say, "How do I open a port on this Cisco router?", the AI tools are going to give me the YAML code. In spite of not being a Linux guy or a great coder, I can use those tools to ramp up very quickly. Making Lightspeed a part of Red Hat deployment initiatives tremendously helps with customers' success. It gives them that extra tool. Right now, it is being sold separately as a subscription. If they could integrate that capability, people would not have to go use ChatGPT and other tools. They could use that as a part of it. It would just align things with Red Hat, so one area they can improve on is the approach to customer success for new deployments.

Red Hat Insights are instrumental in identifying vulnerabilities. I am still learning, but my understanding is that it is not directly connected to your environment to deploy a patch or vulnerability fix. It is going to give a YAML playbook to do that. It does not actually execute it. On the Windows side, I have an approval process on the server where I can say, "Deploy this patch." I thought of Insights along the same lines where I can just approve things, and then based on some backend configuration, it will implement them using Ansible, Satellite, and on-premises Ansible. It seems disconnected right now. It might not be, but to me, there seems to be a gap there. I love Insights, and I want to fully automate that approval process. This could be a point for improvement if it does not already do that.

Another area of improvement is Red Hat expressing a return on investment better. I do not know if they have determined a lot of that. I have always assumed that I could go with an open-source OS in a less expensive manner than Windows or something else. My impression is that there would be less cost, but I do not know that for certain. Red Hat building out some of that ROI on different products would be beneficial to their sales effort.

We are a brand new customer.

It is more stable than the wild west environment that I have been in. There is standardization. It is stable by standardizing.

So far, its scalability has been good. Once I get a good image built, I will get some workflows built into Ansible. I will have that process all the way down to the help desk. We will be entering variables and kicking out systems all day.

We have been using it minimally. We have about 15% Linux environment with lots of flavors. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is what we are centralizing on from now on, so we are going to do a conversion of all those. We have a new standard going forward. We have about 15% Linux systems, which would amount to about 150 systems throughout North America. It is a small footprint.

I have not had to call them much, so I do not have a good handle on support from Red Hat. Everybody gets at least a C or a five, but I am optimistic. It is going to be good. I would give them at least a seven out of ten.

Neutral

Prior to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, it was CentOS and others. CentOS was free. It was whatever was available or the developers or applications guys were familiar with.

We switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for centralization, to be supported, and for patching and vulnerabilities.

Most of the things that I am deploying or replacing are on-prem and on Azure cloud. It is 50/50.

The deployment was very easy. They have a great and user-friendly installation process with 9.x and above. However, just being new to it and having a security hat on, I still struggle with what should and should not be installed on the base image. It is a learning curve for me, but using the interface has been great. I was able to join Active Directory and all those things.

CDW is handling our professional services and our training, which is a separate purchase. Its initial rollout is with CDW.

We have not yet seen an ROI.

It is expensive. Everything is. I was happy to get a three-year Red Hat Enterprise Linux contract for our initial rollout. 

It is less expensive than other solutions. It is a growing company.

It is called Microsoft ARC. It now facilitates patches for Linux, but it did not include certain things. For me, there was much more benefit outside of just patching by going with Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ansible.

I am not yet certain about Red Hat Insights' vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance. We are at the beginning. We are just adding systems. I have not set those alerts up if they exist. I assume there are some. I am also going to evaluate how accurate the vulnerability and patching information is because we have other security products that are looking at the same things on the Windows side, and they have already identified many of the vulnerabilities. As a new customer, I want to make sure that if our other system says something is a vulnerability, Red Hat Insights also says that it is a vulnerability. I want to feel confident in the vulnerabilities that I am getting from Red Hat Insights. I want to make sure that other products are also scanning for the same thing. I suspect it is.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would recommend going for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I cannot think of another OS that can match this.

I will start off with an optimistic ten, and I will rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.