Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

My principal focus in using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) currently is as an integrator in Linux, where I have many services in consulting, deployment, installation, and troubleshooting in Linux. I have a recovery system, deployment clusters, databases, and work in any environment in data centers. At this moment, I am a senior consultant in the data center in open source.

The best features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) depend on the client because the client can decide to use RHEL, not me. The principal thing is the support for the clients because many clients are corporate and have a need for enterprise support. It's the principal focus and is different from using Ubuntu or Debian or any other Linux.

Other good things about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include the focus on system patching, upgrades, and security. The security advisories and authorization are very strong in Red Hat, and that is the principal focus—security.

I manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by provisioning patching, new deployments, automation, and anything else needed.

I am satisfied with the management experience of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and find it satisfactory for this purpose.

I would rate customer service or tech support with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a seven, no more.

I give it a seven because of the time it takes for responding to problems; it takes too long.

For management, it is medium; it is not easy, it is a medium level.

I see a medium ROI with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because it has a high price. OpenShift may provide better ROI, but OpenShift is very high.

The initial setup of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is complex.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate it a five—medium complex.

A very expensive time is needed for deploying clouds with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

It takes a lot of time.

In many cases, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) does not help me save time because the principal problem is that in AWS, Red Hat Linux is not the natural Linux for deployment; the default deployment in Amazon is Amazon Linux, not Red Hat Linux.

In many cases, it does not depend on direct Red Hat support for saving time.

My thoughts on the knowledge base with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that it is good but it does not have it all because I have the medium and plus; it needs more knowledge base.

I have been using this for 20 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has high scalability; it is high for horizontal scalability in any environment, and there are many solutions for scalability.

I would rate customer service or tech support with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a seven, no more.

I give it a seven because of the time it takes for responding to problems; it takes too long.

The initial setup of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is complex.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate it a five—medium complex.

I see a medium ROI with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because it has a high price. OpenShift may provide better ROI, but OpenShift is very high.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is less expensive than OpenShift, which is very expensive.

I am a reseller and a partner with Red Hat.

I am involved with Red Hat.

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for my labs, so I am a reseller, partner, and user. I would rate this review overall as an eight.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) at the enterprise level to host various applications. RHEL is our enterprise strategy for the Linux operating system, and it helps us host most of our mission-critical applications.

The feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I appreciate the most is the security features. The security features of RHEL protect our environment. By having strong security hygiene with RHEL, we are able to provide business value back to our stakeholders.

I have been involved in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) migrations and upgrades. I would describe the experience of RHEL migrations as challenging since it's not an easy task to migrate thousands of machines in one major release window. RHEL has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risks, as we keep RHEL current with patching.

The image model that is currently being deployed with RHEL 10 is going to be a way of improving RHEL. I'm using CICD pipelines to manage the OS, just as we do applications. We don't have specific metrics on how much less risk has been lowered or how much downtime has been mitigated, howrever, we do keep our systems patched within 30 days of CVE being released, so our risk exposure is quite low.

To make Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a ten out of ten, addressing the enterprise management tools, such as SELinux policy management and firewalls, would bring it much more in line, especially regarding security features and overall operations management.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for approximately 14 years.

The stability and reliability of the platform are excellent.

We have scaled both in the data center as well as in the edge with over 15,000 devices.

We have a very good relationship with Red Hat for support and customer service. We have a TAM service, so from a support perspective, our cases are handled very efficiently.

Positive

I considered other solutions while choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and we have a combination of RHEL and open-source free versions of RHEL. The biggest difference between RHEL and those open-source versions is support; at the end of the day, it's the partnership for support from Red Hat versus the binaries where it's self-managed and self-maintained.

Currently, we deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on-premises and we use open-source technologies to provision and deploy both bare metal and virtual.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the whole ecosystem and partnership with Red Hat.

We have enterprise contracts with Red Hat, and regarding pricing, we have a good deal. On a scale of one to ten, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an eight.

We mainly use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for general applications. We have Red Hat Enterprise Linux for identity management. We use it for NTP services. Most of the bank services that run on Linux run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Our core applications include bank cards solutions.

It is a stable operating system, and that is why we use it. We have many team members who understand how to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so it's much easier to use this version of Linux to deploy services.

There is ease of use. A lot of resources are available online if the team wants to understand something. There is also the ability to use various automation tools to run multiple tasks.

For risk reduction and compliance, we have CIS benchmarks. There are various configuration files that we are able to update and change. Using the benchmarks available from CIS, I can have a template and automate that across multiple machines using automation features such as Ansible. When examining permissions for file systems, enabling login, and enabling file integrity, these are the items we would use for security.

The simplicity of patching Red Hat Enterprise Linux is most valuable. We just use the DNF update. We use the Red Hat satellite for our patch repositories, which is quite simple. I look at it at an infrastructure level because I'm in the infrastructure team, not in the application team.

The knowledge base is good. When we troubleshoot or have issues, we go to the Red Hat website. There are a lot of documented issues. They have a good knowledge base.

Identity management could be simpler. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has Identity Manager, but it is not as simple to use as Microsoft Windows Active Directory.

I have been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a very long time, approximately 15 years.

It is stable. I would rate its stability a nine out of ten.

So far, I have not been affected by significant issues in terms of security.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scalable, so I would rate its scalability a nine out of ten.

We are using it across two sites. We have 6,000 people.

I have contacted tech support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for some questions. Their tech support is quite good compared to other companies.

Positive

Before working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I used CentOS and Microsoft Windows. While comparing CentOS with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I see stability as an advantage; Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quite a stable operating system.

I have done cloud deployments and upgrades.

It does not require a lot of maintenance. For managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems, when it comes to provisioning and patching, we use Ansible, which allows us to patch multiple machines. We normally use Red Hat Insights. Once we configure our machines to talk to Red Hat Insights via Red Hat Satellite, it can tell us the vulnerability status of various machines in the environment. Then, we can decide which machines are most vulnerable and patch accordingly. We can use automation tools such as Ansible to run various patches across the environment.

We have used Leap to do the upgrades from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 was going end of life. Upgrading from one version to another can be a bit complex. It is sometimes an issue because of multiple compatibilities. You need someone who is a bit skilled on the operating system.

We did the deployment ourselves, not through an integrator, reseller, or consultant.

We have four people involved in maintenance because we have many servers.

The cost of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is reasonable.

I would recommend it for mission-critical applications. It's a good operating system to run mission-critical applications.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten because of the support, stability, and ease of use.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are primarily our websites and applications that run on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) operating system platform.

What I appreciate most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the SELinux policy that has been introduced; I believe that is truly good security, although it was difficult initially to become accustomed to it. In the modern world, you don't want every user to have accessible permissions. It gives you a granular level of control over each and every file and directory, just as ACLs used to provide in the past. By using SELinux policy, you can actually secure these accesses and establish a strong security posture.

The main business problem that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helped us solve is automation of tasks and scalability of the business. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped reduce downtime because in modern infrastructure, you do not face out of memory issues. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has affected the downtime by reducing it to a minimal level; the reboots are very speedy.

I think the support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be much better; when it comes to something such as SUSE Linux, I feel those providers are doing a much better job in terms of support than what Red Hat provides. One area where Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) stability could be improved is with Ksplice; Ksplice is used for online patching. The problem I have seen with it is that it applies patches at the user level, but not at the kernel level. That was a problem in terms of our security architecture because it doesn't recognize that the patch has been installed. I evaluate the customer service or tech support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as needing improvement; addressing the tickets takes a little longer and there has been a lack of consistency. Not every engineer who handles a case handles it correctly. Everybody has a different way of handling the tickets. So, the support needs to be a little bit more streamlined.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the past three years.

My assessment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s stability and reliability once it is deployed in production and maintained is that it's straightforward, but there's a huge functionality and learning curve. We started using it and actually understood the reason why Red Hat has implemented it and the level of granularity in terms of security posture that it provides. We understood that it's doing a really good job.

I assess the stability, availability, and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as pretty stable and very reliable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has crashed or failed here and there, but there were some settings that needed to be changed. We make sure that we match those parameters.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales to my needs pretty much up-to-date.

The support from a competitor I've used is Oracle. My experience with Oracle support is that Oracle on-premises support, what it provides with Oracle Enterprise Linux, performs very well, and many of our customers believe that something from Oracle is more secure. When they compare Oracle with Red Hat, it has a much better support system and a much more secure posture than what we get.

I evaluate the customer service or tech support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as needing improvement; addressing the tickets takes a little longer and there has been a lack of consistency. Not every engineer who handles a case handles it correctly. Everybody has a different way of handling the tickets. So, the support needs to be a little bit more streamlined.

Neutral

My experience with the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been smooth because back then we were on-premises and all our information used to be on-premises, rather than run them completely as we do now.

I have evaluated a couple of operating systems including Ubuntu, Oracle Linux, SUSE, and then came to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because Red Hat is considered the pioneer.

I have considered replacing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with another solution; specifically Oracle Linux.

If I were to switch, I would consider factors such as security and support.

We are currently considering using the Ansible Automation Platform for configuration and patching; we are using a manual approach and a little bit of Ansible here and there, but not fully deployed an Ansible Automation Platform or command line approach. But today I had the experience in the lab with the Ansible Automation Platform. That looks truly promising. I hope to get a chance to do a proof of concept and show my company that this is the product we can use in the future.

I have used the in-place upgrades to migrate machines to a newer release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL); I used LEAP which has been designed to upgrade Linux 7 to Linux 8, and it was smooth. I think that was truly good work, especially because it supports you in situations where you do patching.

The upgrade process for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is straightforward and we didn't have any problems.

We are planning on upgrading from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 and 7 to 8, though we do have some legacy applications that would not support it. However, other systems which are web servers or Apache, we are trying to upgrade them.

I haven't found any limitations in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s security.

My assessment of the documentation offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that Red Hat's documentation is top notch. You cannot compare that with SUSE.

My specific goals that led me to choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include the security posture.

Current, I am using the standard lifecycle support add-on for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL); I think we are still sticking with the standard and haven't upgraded yet.

The advice I would give to a team considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that one of the new features that it has is promising, and everybody promises great things with new features. My overall rating for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is nine out of ten.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are server virtualization.

It allows us to stay more in line with our mandates.

What I value the most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are the patching capacity and the patching capacity with Ansible. The patching capacity of RHEL has improved my company significantly. It allows us to stay more in line with our mandates for our infrastructure. I assess the knowledge base offered by RHEL as fantastic.

Security requirements were a consideration when choosing the solution. We liked that the patching rules were straightforward. We've had good experiences with provisioning and patching.

It helps support risk reduction and maintain compliance. The user interface is very intuitive.

We'll be migrating more to RHEL 10. Some in our environment are still in RHEL 7.

It's helped us mitigate risk. Any time we've had to do a patch update, the patch time is minimal. The risk reduction has been significant.

The knowledge base offered by RHEL is excellent. 

Even though I don't have complaints, I would like them to focus even more on what they're doing with Lightspeed and the AI assistance, so they could look more into that.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for three years.

I have never had any problems with the stability and reliability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points by being more scalable.

I have not yet had any experience with customer service and technical support.

We have not used another solution before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), nor are we considering another solution; we've been staying a RHEL shop.

From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that it's very easy to scale up with regards to patching and updating.

I really dont have much to do with the licensing aspects. 

The advice I would give to other companies considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is to seriously look into it and really not be too stuck or hung up on one single platform, and explore your options. 

I rate RHEL a nine out of ten.

My main use cases for it are servers, such as web servers, database servers, and any type of server that we need.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps us solve pain points related to security, CVEs, and patching. 

The benefit for my company is that it saves time on compatibility issues. I don't have any metrics of roughly how much time has been saved, but I just know we don't have the combat. I've done Ubuntu, and Ubuntu doesn't compare to Red Hat, so I just know when I need to install something, it works. There are very few times when I've had issues.

Security requirements were a major consideration when choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the cloud because they have secure patching. We review all RPMs and stuff that we import, and that's the major reason.

The feature I appreciate the most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the DNF, yum updates, and RPM, which make it easy to install applications and customize it.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved by making the licensing easier for Amazon EC2 instances. When we try to do auto-scaling, the licensing is hard to automate.

I have been using it since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, so probably 2005.

It's very stable. I haven't had any issues. We don't have to worry about it crashing.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales very well with the growing needs of my company. I've done from one or two to thousands, so it's not a problem.

Their knowledge base is great. Anytime we have patching issues or anything else, we reach out to support, and they always have an answer.

Their technical support has been great. I haven't had any issues with that as they respond right away.

Positive

It has been very good. I've done from one or two to thousands, and I've never had a problem. The only issues were hardware-related. They've been able to support drivers and things like that.

We have a hybrid environment with both on-premises and cloud deployments. I specialize in AWS.  Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) supports our hybrid cloud strategy. When we have things that can't go into AWS, we can spin up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux EC2 instance in AWS to run legacy stuff or stuff that's not compatible with AWS.

We usually use Ansible for provisioning and patching. I am 100% satisfied with the management experience of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems when it comes to provisioning and patching, and I have no issues.

From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is probably stability, as I don't have to worry about it crashing. I've had issues with other forms of Linux, so it's been pretty stable.

It's been good, but I don't really get involved with that.

We did consider other solutions, such as Ubuntu, Amazon Linux, and Rocky Linux. but Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the one we went with. The biggest reason Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) leads the way is support and security.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a 10 out of 10 because of the stability and security. That's the main reason I use it.

My use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include doing OpenShift tasks and general Linux use cases.

The feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I value the most is automation. Automation saves time for me as I don't have to keep doing the same tasks repeatedly. My company benefits from automation in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since we use Ansible to deploy numerous operating systems. 

We can initiate 20 deployments, and they get configured automatically, which is efficient.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) might have helped to mitigate downtime and lower risk, though I cannot think of a specific example.

Improving Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a challenging question. Regarding SELinux, they could make that clearer or make it easier to use.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for about a year.

The stability and reliability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform are really amazing. There are many instances where I'll have an Active Directory server go down, and I go into the remote consoles because Windows is doing forced updates, and it drops, which is extremely annoying. I haven't experienced any similar issues using RHEL.

Evaluating how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales with the growing needs of my company is challenging because much of what I do is lab work, so most projects are not scaling out. They remain at a set scale, then get torn down, and we create another one at that same scale.

I've had limited experience working with Red Hat support. 

I submitted a ticket because I was trying to access training material since we were a partner and were supposed to get it free, however, I had an issue with my account. 

I opened a ticket, and the person who took it responded in 20 seconds and fixed it immediately, which was excellent. I would rate the customer service and technical support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) at a ten out of ten. It was extremely fast.

Positive

I'm not certain if Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the first solution of its kind that our company is using.

Most of my management of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for provisioning and patching is done in labs, so I don't see many persistent workloads. Most systems get torn down. I haven't done much patching, but I'm familiar with Cockpit, and I have personal VMs that I manage that way.

When upgrading from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9, we encountered some issues and had to use a leap utility for jumping between releases. Once we found the documentation, the process was straightforward.

Since we operate in a lab environment, instead of upgrading Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we typically download the newest release.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from my technical perspective is automation. I use automation daily to provision VMs and other systems. You can initiate the process and focus on other tasks while it runs, which increases efficiency.

I get our licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) through our account team, so I don't handle that aspect.

We did not consider other solutions to my knowledge before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since Ansible is ubiquitous in our environment.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) overall as a nine. There are some inconsistencies with commands, since it's built upon years of development, some legacy commands remain with opposite rules compared to newer commands. If it were more consistent, it would merit a ten.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that previously, I used it on database servers, and right now, we are using them for web servers, JBoss, and JDV servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales well with the growing needs of my organization because RBC always needs new servers, whether they can be Linux or Windows servers, but mostly we are using Linux since we don't use JBoss or JDV on Windows.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points because it is very versatile and stable, and we always use it for our new business.

Specifically, I can say that if we have a subscription, we can make installation easily and access repositories easily.

This benefits my organization significantly because Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is really useful, very stable, and very versatile.

In terms of additional features for the next release, I saw it comes with AI integration, but we don't know the architecture yet. We want to see it first, then we can say. AI will be important for us.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for 15 years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as nine out of ten.

I have experienced downtime, crashes, or performance issues, but it happens only maybe once a year or something. There is not very much downtime.

I'm not sure if we have expanded our usage at all.

I am very satisfied with the technical support experience; it is very nice.

I would evaluate customer service and technical support as nine. I can give a nine because if we have any problem, we can get a response in a short time, but sometimes it is not the relevant solution; that can happen one or two times in a year, which seems normal.

Positive

I have not used another solution to address similar needs prior to adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Our deployment model is that RBC is using all of them—on-prem, cloud, and hybrid.

I would describe my experience with deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as limited because mostly it is our Linux team working on it. They are the ones deploying it while we mostly are ordering servers and using them.

I have not seen an ROI with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), as I'm not on the finance side and I'm not calculating it.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing indicates that if you compare it with other operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is cheaper than them.

We are not on the selecting side before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because if you want to use Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is always our first option. We don't check other options.

What stood out to me about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that I remember Oracle released a Linux for their database installation, but I don't see anybody using that, as we are mostly using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I prefer Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as an operating system.

I'm not sure if Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risk.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has improved since version five, then six, seven, right now eight and nine; it always comes with new features, sometimes new application security enhancements. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is improving, and it has improved.

I would assess the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as very nice because if we have any problem or error, we can find it easily at the portal.

Nothing is perfect.

My advice to another organization considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that I prefer to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) always. I recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I gave this review a rating of 9 out of 10.