Red Hat Lightspeed Reviews

I did not purchase the product through AWS Marketplace; AWS was primarily used as the platform for workloads. We use basic services within AWS, but I did not use anything from the marketplace because we were working on the core OS and other technologies.

Red Hat Insights is part of Red Hat Satellite, being a bundle that gives me access to both Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Insights.

I have been working with Red Hat Insights for about five years.

I have been using mainly on-premise solutions because I haven't used much on the cloud.

I have not used the policy management feature of Red Hat Insights much because it only gives details of the current infrastructure, and it's not of much use. The Red Hat Satellite product is mainly used to create a standard operating environment, which requires segregating servers based on applications and environments for patching purposes.

The best features of Red Hat Insights lie in observing the current state of systems, though people don't use it much because of its tight integration with Satellite and limited features compared to better tools available today.

In terms of configuration, Red Hat Insights could use some improvement. When I deploy Red Hat, the installation means a pure vanilla installation where you run and install a product out of the box, but deployment involves configuration plus all necessary tooling to run that product, which requires human input to complete the installation, configurations, and integration.

Red Hat Insights has very limited automation; it only detects anomalies and triggers corrective actions for compliance issues, something which I found lacking when compared to other tools I've used.

I have been working in my sphere for roughly 15 years.

Red Hat support is very good; their response regarding SLAs has improved significantly in India, and I have no complaints about the support I continue to receive.

Positive

Installation for Red Hat Insights and Red Hat Satellite is straightforward for people who know how to deploy, but the configuration is complex.

I personally took part in the deployment process.

Deployment can take almost three days if I have all my use cases ready.

I did not do deployment alone; I had a team of 10 to 12 people working, reporting to me, while I designed the entire deployment, and they deployed it. I have deployed it a couple of times, so I was able to direct and help my team to deploy it under my supervision.

I am not satisfied with the overall licensing policy or pricing; each year's subscription cost can be quite high at around $900, which seems very costly for smaller companies that might prefer free alternatives.

I have not worked directly with Nexus, but I have gone through Nexus reports, and they detect system vulnerabilities very well. The Nexus report is considered de facto for system audits by most IT companies, while Red Hat Insights is not as capable in this aspect.

I have not used Red Hat Insights much in identifying potential vulnerabilities, and based on what I've seen, there are better tools available for that purpose.

In terms of optimizing risk identification, I would rate Red Hat Insights around five to six on a scale of 1 to 10.

I would give Red Hat Insights an overall rating of six on a scale from 1 to 10.

I would rate technical support at around eight.

My overall rating for Red Hat Insights is 6 out of 10.

My usual use case for Red Hat Insights is to get the most useful information regarding proactive information to promptly fix issues beforehand. That's the first one and more important. Let's stick to the first one; it's the main one.

I use the predictive analytics feature in Red Hat Insights.

The most valuable feature of Red Hat Insights that I have found is the proactive information on issues that you don't see but are possibly going to happen in the environment.

The impact of Red Hat Insights real-time actionable intelligence on identifying and addressing misconfigurations in my IT infrastructure is notable, as I can identify misconfiguration issues. When it comes to security, we are not using it because it is simply not applicable and also because we have Satellite, so we are using it in order to spot the issues that are present.

The intuitive dashboard of Red Hat Insights has aided my IT team in monitoring and identifying issues within the infrastructure before they impact business operations, as I mentioned before. This is part of the same platform, so I don't split this and that internally. To me, this is all about stability coming down from Red Hat Insights.

I have not utilized the automation capabilities for remediation tasks within Red Hat Insights. The point is that we have a detached environment, so it is not really applicable. Here, what could be improved dramatically is the ability to have it used by an enterprise, which means to interlock with Ansible Automation Platform first.

Secondly, including a change number or something that can help in tracking the remediation would be beneficial. If you come from an enterprise, you want to have all of the IT stuff in place. You cannot just remediate; you need to have a change and everything in place, and then you can do it. So even the planning can be something that can be improved.

I have been using Red Hat Insights since the kickstart in 2020, unless I'm mistaken. I'm not sure if it was 2020 or 2021, but let's say it has been since it was released.

My experience with the setup and deployment of Red Hat Insights was that the main challenge was to be able to reach Red Hat Insights from every single host. The point is that there is a need for a network connection that goes in the cloud, and this was not given in an easy way.

When it comes to how it has helped improve the stability of my system, let me stick to stability because for the others it's not really meaningful for us. When there is an incident or even beforehand, we are going to check the report for a given server and we can already exclude issues that are possibly known. This has happened at least once in an SSH incident, where it reported that our configuration was known to create issues, and this has been fixed in a very easy way. The root cause was then analyzed and understood.

The stability of Red Hat Insights over the years is not applicable because it's a cloud service.

As for scalability, it is not applicable in my case at all since it is a cloud service.

Regarding technical support, it was not used at the time, but I would rate them as with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Positive

Before Red Hat Insights, I didn't use anything else. I just started with that one.

I participated in the initial setup and deployment of Red Hat Insights in my company.

I was integrating it directly; I did everything myself regarding the integration, deployment, and initial setup without using the help of a consultant.

I personally think that it's value for money; absolutely.

The pricing of Red Hat Insights is included in the offer at a minimum if you have it, but I think it's included and that's it, unless I'm mistaken.

I am a customer as well.

We do not use Red Hat as our cloud provider; we have everything on-premise.

Red Hat Insights is embedded in my offer with RHEL for sure, so it's something that is already given, at least for us. For the contract that we have.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Red Hat Insights as a nine.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and Satellite for patch management. We're also using Ansible for automation and hardening. Additionally, I'm doing a migration project from RHEL 7 to RHEL 9. Our environment is a mixture of on-prem and cloud systems. We are a hospital, so we can't keep some information on the cloud for compliance reasons. 

We have a separate team for the hybrid, and I'm part of that team. We've been migrating a few servers from on-prem to the cloud. Everything used to be on a hardware server, but now we use the cloud for the storage network. We share workloads between the cloud and the physical data center. Our Rubrik data backup archives to the cloud with Microsoft Azure. We also partner with Pure Storage, which we use for on-prem storage.

We have physical Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers for the Splunk environment, which is the security solution we use. Hadoop went to the cloud, but it used to be on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have VMware, and our VMs are reserved for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We have been using Red Hat since I was hired. All the app owners want Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports SQL and Oracle databases, which is helpful.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has made significant improvements in terms of storage. You can mount an 18 terabyte file system. It also supports NFS shares and the SIP share for the photos. There have been many features added since RHEL 6. It's more user-friendly and graphical. 

We use Ansible as a go-to for provisioning and hardening the servers. It's so much easier with Ansible because we used scripts in the past. We had to log into each server as such, and it took a long time. With Ansible, we just run one playbook, and it takes care of everything. 

I used Leapp for my upgrade from RHEL 7 to 8. It's an excellent utility tool. When I run the Leapp script, it tells me everything I need to take care of before I run a migration. Red Hat Insight is good because it tells you about the future patches available. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux image builder. Our golden image is a real image. We harden it, and it's our golden server. When we need a new VM, we can just make a snapshot of that. If it's a physical server, then I have to do it manually.

AIX will be out of support in the next few years, so that is a problem because a lot of the clinical apps use AIX. 

I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux since I started working at this hospital six years ago.  

I rate Red Hat support eight out of 10. It's helpful when we face hardware issues, kernel panics, or the server is hanging. We always open a support case with Red Hat, and they're helpful at every level. It used to be in the United States, but now they outsource everything to India, so there is a big time difference. That's the only issue. 

Positive

We have always used Red Hat, but they use CentOS for a few applications. Most are using Red Hat. Another team uses Microsoft Windows 2016. It's a different team. The application team decides which one they prefer, but most clinicians use Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.

The application owners like Red Hat instead of CentOS or another flavor of Linux because the support is reliable. If something breaks, they can call Red Hat support. It's the enterprise standard Linux.

I do the Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades. It's straightforward because I can just run Leapp to upgrade it

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux nine out of 10. 

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for running applications and databases on them.

It has a smaller footprint, so it uses less storage. The product is optimized for resource utilization. Patching is very streamlined for the operating system compared to Windows. We prefer using Red Hat Enterprise Linux over Windows whenever we can. Patching is much easier, and it seems more mature. When we apply a patch, we're less likely to have problems after. It's more stable.

All resources should be available on the website.

I have been using the solution for about three years.

I rate the support a nine or nine and a half out of ten. I am not rating support a ten out of ten because if we were able to receive all of the resources that we could from the website, then we wouldn't need to reach out and contact support. It's a learning curve.

Positive

Previously, we used CentOS. We have also used Oracle Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux's kernel. Now, we're strictly trying to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it provides great support.

The products are pretty similar. A lot of the implementations, commands, and updates are very similar. Overall, we've had a more positive experience using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have a basic build routine when building new servers, updating, and installing add-ons. When we run those scripts, it seems like it's so much more streamlined with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It could be because we're converting everything to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We're exploring more automation features. Three years is still relatively new for an operating system for our department. As we explore more automation-rich features and tools and subsets of tools, we'll be able to utilize the solution better. Red Hat Enterprise Linux may be very good at it, but our knowledge and experience are still growing. We need to take a deeper dive into implementing automation.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Microsoft Azure. We did not have concerns about using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud because we had spoken to other customers of Azure that had been running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We can install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our own, or we can use the custom-built Red Hat Enterprise Linux images available through Azure. It makes the deployment of a server much quicker and more efficient.

We have been migrating some workloads and applications from on-premise to Azure. However, we do not constantly move workloads back and forth between Azure. It's more of a one-way migration. We're trying to be less on-premise and more in the cloud. There's definitely a learning curve for the migration. There were some hiccups with learning how to do the migrations. We've done a handful of migrations so far, and each time, we learn from our previous experiences and mistakes. We use our lessons learned and have a better experience each time that we do a migration. It's getting smoother each time.

The knowledge base offered by the product is really good. There are a lot of resources available on the website. We have a direct contact for support, which we utilize on a regular basis. We have enterprise licenses, so we pay for support. We get support whenever we need it. I have been involved in Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades. It's pretty straightforward. We just convert from different Linux operating systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. My technical team has used Red Hat Insights, Image Builder, and Convert2RHEL.

We keep pretty close to the most current versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There are many different versions of the product. Version 9 is the most current. We're trying to stay up with at least one or two versions close to the most current version to stay updated. We don't want to get to a version that would be at the end of its life.

The solution has helped us streamline and optimize our infrastructure for any applications or databases we run on a Linux operating system. They help us save on our physical resources because they're less demanding. Therefore, we don't have to spend as much money on a server that has a lot of CPU and a lot of memory. We can fit many more VMs on a single physical virtualization host because it's optimized. The support is great, and we can find quite a bit of information either directly through the Red Hat website or through the Red Hat community. We're able to do research on our own and find most of the information that we need. If we can't, support will assist us.

Overall, I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

Internally, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for services and for applications that we run, especially Linux based-applications. We also have SAP solutions, which we sell to the customers as a total solution with Red Hat, SAP HANA, and also for our own cloud-based SAP HANA, which is under Red Hat's operating system.

Red Hat Insights is quite an interesting and valuable feature. Lately, we used the malware scan feature. The Cockpit feature and web interface were quite helpful. We have also begun with OpenSCAP, which used is to harden the operating system's security features.

The first area for improvement is documentation, and I consider it since I have been working in IT for more than twenty-five years. For twenty years, I have been working with open source, and I see that the documentation is lacking, so it needs to do more work on its documentation part. Most open source and upstreams from Red Hat products work from the open source solution and have better documentation than in the actual Red Hat products.

New products need better documentation. The websites also have a single sign-on to get you from one side to the other. As a partner, I had a problem finding out how I needed to connect and to which side of the solution. I consider myself an expert user of the internet and websites, but going from one side to the other, was quite problematic.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud for four to five years at least. My company has a partnership with Red Hat, and so we have our own licensing for the product. We have customers whom we manage, and they purchased the licenses on the go from the cloud provider. We just sold them the managed services. But mostly through us, we should be selling the licenses.

It's a very stable product, and that is actually the reason we are forcing or pushing customers to go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The solution is scalable.

I rate the support a seven out of ten. The support is knowledgeable but slow if we have to get answers.

Positive

We use Red Hat Satellite for managed services for our customers. And, of course, we use a product of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for servers. We started with OpenShift in the lab at the beginning, but now I'm beginning to produce it for our own services. So, now I can offer these to the customers.

One of the discussions in my company at the beginning of this year was to see if we could test our services on-premises for the virtualization, specifically for the KVM virtualization. But since it was not approved, we'll have to see the next step.

I have worked with other open source distributors. I have worked with SCO-Linux and Unix, which is the base of Linux. I didn't personally make the decision to switch. The company decided to switch since we are partners, and we are focusing on putting in the best efforts in terms of the partnership and customers we have with Red Hat.

The solution is deployed on both on-premises and the cloud. We have customers on the cloud server platform where we run their network, and we manage through Satellite. We also have it on-premises.

I was involved in the deployment of the solution. We created some automation, so the setup phase is straightforward. We use templates for all of those, but to manage the templates, and what it will include, we use external tools to make it easier for the deployment automation.

Regarding deployment time, it can be done in seconds. It also depends on what application we are speaking about since for an OS or more difficult solution, like Red Hat Satellite, you need more time.

I have seen a return on investment, especially considering the time taken to resolve the problem where we bought some support from Red Hat.

Regarding the prices, the new changes are actually not bad as it works for enterprise solutions. But it could have some other options for super solutions for the students in colleges, and they could actually win more customers from that. Of course, we have the test licensing and all that for the partners, where it's very useful for us to be able to test more of the products. But to win more would be much easier for us also if they introduce special pricing for students, universities, governmental institutions and all that. Most probably there is a price for them, but we haven't got that information. Also, Red Hat sometimes goes directly and not through the partner, but I'm not an expert.

I wasn't the one to make a choice, but I think my company evaluated other options, and it was their choice to go with Red Hat.

My company is a private cloud company. Mostly, we have our own private services, providing private cloud services to the customers. But we also provide public clouds like Azure and some Amazon clouds.

Regarding resiliency, it is a good standardized OS with stability. But sometimes, it is a little slow in reaction to problems that might appear. For example, we had this big Java Log4j bug where their reaction was very slow compared to other distributions. Of course, they found the solution when they had it, but it was quite a slow reaction. In general, it's a very stable OS.

Regarding how easy or difficult it is for you to move workloads between the cloud and your data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I don't have any solution for that. I have to migrate it manually right now.

Regarding the cost-saving capability of the solution, I would say that it is possible to save on costs because of the automation we use through Red Hat Satellite for maintenance and how we have managed automation, time to spend on the service, maintenance, test, problems, etc. So, you can say that it's been a cost-saving procedure.

I rate the overall product a seven and a half out of ten.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for off-the-shelf applications and Oracle databases. 

The tool is simple and easy to use. It has good support and doesn't have many outages due to the OS. 

The cockpit server doesn't work and is useless. I don't like the images shown in GCP. I prefer the ones in AWS. It seems like the solution is in tune with what we deploy on the private cloud. 

I have been using the solution for ten years. 

We open a case whenever we need support. Whenever I need support, I contact the technical guy assigned to us and provide him with the documentation. 

Positive

I have used different OS like Motorola, Unix Flavors, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, DG/UX, and Sonos OS. Unix is dying, and everything is moving to Linux. Linux is open-source and easier to use. 

We build our own deployment method. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expensive. We have changed the cloud provider's subscription to a pay-as-you-go model. 

We use the on-premise, cloud, and hybrid versions. We have deployed it on AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. Most of our infrastructure is in the Azure cloud. I work in the server infrastructure team, and other data collectors work on AWS and GCP. We haven't used the tool's features like the image builder. 

The product supports our hybrid cloud strategy. We have been migrating using tools from Microsoft Azure. Its knowledge base is good. Sometimes, finding an article is difficult. However, once I reach them, it contains good information. 

We used Azure's tools for migration to the cloud. It is straightforward. We have no problems deploying the servers. Our main strategy focused on data centers.

We use the Leapp tool to manage the upgrades. It works smoothly on our Oracle databases. Leapp is straightforward to use. 

We use Red Hat Insights quite a bit. I have not explored all the features yet. We use it to look for events our monitoring hasn't picked up. It also helps us with tips and hints for fine-tuning applications like SAP and Oracle. We go by these recommendations and follow them to put the applications in place. I have downloaded the Playbooks for remediation. 

I use system rules for SAP tuning in Oracle. I do not use the image builder since we already have a process to do the server builds. I use the web console once in a while. 

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's role-based security model enables us to provide discretionary access levels to users based on their roles and their responsibilities. We can also assign access based on service level to maintain service-level accounts for any purpose. If we need to back up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux box, we can assign a role to access that box only on the backup level. 

Red Hat Insights allows us to find vulnerabilities and conduct assessments from our central portal. It gives us insight into the compliance levels of different boxes and their licenses. Red Hat Insights helps us be proactive by giving us the details of recurring issues and vulnerabilities or zero-day threats. It automatically shows us what needs to be prioritized. It improves operations to have a single pane of glass for all your inventories and business. You can also implement automation and remedy most things from the cloud console. This is very helpful. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us achieve security standards certification. Most of our customers require compliance with regulations and internal security policy also. We have to be compliant with the profile for each standard based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux profiles or OSCAP integration. Satellite helps us remedy and manage compliance issues in daily operations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the most reliable Linux flavor in terms of enterprise governance. I prefer it for its code stability, support, and integration. The lifecycle management features help us maintain compliance and keep the components updated.

The built-in security features simplify risk reduction. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has built-in OSCAP profiles that we can select during implementation based on our industry and compliance needs. Using the OSCAP profile, we can minimize the effort needed to keep the software up to date. We also like the Red Hat Co-Pilot, which allows you to configure most things from the GUI.

We also have OpenShift, which enables elaborate, portable, and reliable ccontainerization. We use the System Roles feature when we have to disable root users and assign the system roles on the application level because some applications do not require root-level access or real group access. The System Role feature allows us to impose level controls and segmentation between the users. We can also automate security configurations to maintain consistency across systems over time.

I would like to use OSCAP profiles without the dependency on Red Hat Insights. If you install the OSCAP profiles from Red Hat Insights, I'm not sure if it is currently available in the cloud console. Most of the time, we manage compliance from Red Hat Satellite, but this feature could also be built into the console. Maybe it's not an issue price-wise most of the time, but it would be easier if we could use the same console and test-level capabilities.

I also want the co-pilot to provide more granular control and more features in the GUI, so we can have one configuration from the GUI itself. It would be helpful to have a feature similar to the one in Windows where we can manage all the net flows from one console in a single pane of glass and install it on-premises like an admin center. It would be great if Red Hat had some kind of admin center to manage all the Red Hat Enterprise Linux boxes without using an additional product like Satellite or something, we could use the co-pilot on all the systems to monitor the dashboard.

We started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 in 2015. Now, we are on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, so it has been around eight or nine years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a robust product. 

The scalability depends on the computing capacity and architecture. It varies based on whether we are replicating boxes or putting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux images into containers. The tool we use for orchestration is also a factor. 

I rate Red Hat support 10 out 10. We are mostly dealing with Level 1 or Level 2 support, and we always get a prompt response. Remote support is also available, which is nice. 

Positive

We used some open-source Linux flavors that are now obsolete and CentOS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides excellent support for migrating from CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux at any level, so kudos to Red Hat for that. There is a great tool that enables us to migrate an existing application without any changes, so we can convert CentOS boxes.

There are one or two commercial Linux flavors that can compete with Red Hat, but their based on different architectures. Red Hat has a large portfolio, including OpenShift and SQL automation, offering deep integration between these tools. I don't think there is a competing product that offers a comparable product portfolio because Red Hat is under the umbrella of IBM now and also provides a multi-cloud solution. 

The initial deployment is straightforward. There's no problem. However, it also depends on what we want to achieve. Some of the options add a little complexity. It isn't very complicated, but it requires a different method. Overall, the general installation and configuration are effortless, and we don't have any issues. The initial installation can be done in 15-30 minutes, depending on the computing and storage capacity. 

We have one administrator experienced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and enterprise Linux for maintence. We prefer a certified person who can understand the data complexities and advanced configuration, but a technician doesn't need to be a specialist to conduct the installation. 

The pricing depends upon the customer's bill of materials and what the customers are planning. Sometimes, a reseller and vendor partners provide a better price. I recommended buying the Red Hat Virtual Data Center instead of buying the Red Hat Enterprise Linux standalone licenses if anyone just wants to run a workload in the cloud environment. Virtual Data Center is the most cost-efficient.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux license has a one-time cost, but there is an ongoing subscription for support with various levels. The license is perpetual, but we pay annually for support. Red Hat's support license is robust. You get three levels of professional support plus community support. Our banking, finance, and telecom clients rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux entirely for their production workloads, so they need to minimize downtime. There is no comparison between professional and open source. We can provide support for some of our clients and set up redundancy, so that's something we can consider when we're looking at licensing or support costs. 

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 out of 10. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an affordable product and a great value. It is constantly evolving and adding capabilities. We can orchestrate a multi-cloud environment for Nutanix under Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's an excellent product for virtualization.  

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for virtualization and multi-cloud environment integrations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has improved our organization by at least 10% in the business unit and multiplies across the other business units as well.

The most valuable features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are the mobile applications and getting real-time notifications. With other solutions, each cloud infrastructure is hard to manage with different notifications coming on, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is able to go on-premises and cloud.

A lot of improvement is required to get security compliance, especially with the privacy of the data, managing it, and storing it.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for five to seven years.

The solution's initial setup involves initial hiccups going back and forth to the requirements and the architecture, but so far, so good.

We have seen a return on investment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux regarding timely customer delivery, leading with innovation, and going into cloud solutions. It has progressed, and the maturity level has improved. So, we are learning as we go along this journey.

A lot of improvement is required to get security compliance, especially with the privacy of the data, managing it, and storing it. I'm sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be able to improve in the future.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's effect on our system's uptime or security has been really positive. Especially with the customer's feedback coming out, I would definitely like to continue its usage.

It has enabled us to achieve 50% security standards certification. It doesn't fall into that domain, but the overall security policies do help integrate with it.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a hybrid-cloud environment. It has not yet supported our hybrid cloud strategy. It's still a work in progress, but I'm sure they will be able to do it in the future.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is really helpful, especially in connecting different cross-functional communities.

Our in-house monitoring services team with the network operating center manages our Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems regarding provisioning and patching. It has quite a good integration with Red Hat.

We have tried Red Hat Insights, and it's really helpful for the market competitive intelligence portal we have in-house and how it interacts with external parties.

We have tried Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles, and it is helpful for on-time delivery.

We have tried the Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console. It has helped us 50%, and it still needs to be reviewed in more detail.

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

We use Red Hat for all sorts of use cases. This includes everything from running applications and databases, or the combination thereof, to building software for products that we use for embedded design.

My company has several RHEL implementations deployed in the field, including versions 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8.

RHEL allows us to run multiple versions of the same application with no problem. We have specific databases and specific versions of them running for the support team, even though some of them are not in support. It has lots of features for things like containerization.

We use a fair bit of Red Hat including other products such as Red Hat Satellite, Red Hat Insights, Red Hat Ansible, and Ansible Tower. We have also attempted to look at an OpenShift PoC. Red Hat seems to be doing a great job integrating their products. For instance, Satellite 7 will finally have all of the Puppet functionality Ansiblized. Overall, they're doing a great job integrating their stack to help make it better.

Having this integrated solution approach provides us with greater operational excellence because we can see what somebody is building. We have the environment captured and have visibility about what went into it for repeatability, reproducibility, scalability, and lots of other benefits.

The most valuable feature of RHEL is that it's well supported. It's a good Linux platform.

RHEL Smart Management gives you access to Satellite, which helps you do automated kickstart deployments. Satellite has a lot of control, giving you the ability to control content promotion, content YUM updates, caching, et cetera. You can have as much or as little overhead in compliance control as you want.

In terms of running and using applications, Red Hat is consistent regardless of the underlying infrastructure. It's implemented on VMware, Proxmox, KVM, and Hyper-V. Whatever underlying infrastructure you put it on, it's still Red Hat, which is great.

We use this product's built-in tracing and monitoring tools such as syslog and SAR (system activity reporter) to provide us with greater insight and visibility into what's going on.

I would like to see improvements made to the subscriptions and management of them.

I have been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since 2013.

Red Hat is a super stable operating system.

RHEL is reliable across environments including bare metal, virtualized, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud. I do not worry about things on Red Hat most of the time, at least not from an operating system perspective.

This is a very scalable product.

From an administrative point of view, we have a team of 10 Linux admins but as far as consumers of the environment, we probably have between several hundred and 1,000 users. It is difficult to estimate precisely.

We have approximately 1,200 VMs with Red Hat Linux registered. We are going through divestitures so our company will be growing and shrinking our usage. We really don't know what next month will look like and whether these systems need to be replicated, duplicated, de-commissioned, et cetera.

I assume that in the future, we will maintain something close to 1,200 hosts.

Red Hat support is great, and I would rate them an eight out of ten.

We have vendor support for our platform that we support internally. We don't often use Red Hat support but it's nice to know that they're there when and in case we need it. It's a good product, so we hardly ever actually have to open support tickets for Red Hat Linux, specifically.

Positive

We also use SUSE Linux and have some implementations that come packaged as an appliance from various vendors. We also have some Ubuntu requirements but those are not managed by the internal Linux operations team.

The initial setup is straightforward. You start off by putting a disk in and specifying what partitions you want. Then, you can opt for a minimal OS or something with more features, such as a web server OS. Once you select what you need, it does some initial configuration and setup.

We always use a minimal configuration and build up from there. Our deployment process is a mix of legacy, where we do a manual install, versus a fully automated installation using Ansible.

For an end-to-end build, we normally take about 20 minutes. That's going from a bare minimum template to all of our security, InfoSec requirements, register to Satellite, register to Insights, etc. 

In summary, the installation is as straightforward as it can be for Linux OS.

We purchase our subscriptions directly from Red Hat and handle the deployment internally.

This is not a cheap solution but it gets you the support if you ever need it. That said, it's nice to know that having Red Hat support is there but it's always stable so I hardly ever use it.

The single subscription and install repository for all types of systems makes it simple to purchase and install Red Hat. We had Red Hat x86 before this, and when we wanted to purchase the newer version, their system made it easy to complete the purchasing and installation processes.

There are a lot of other architectures available that we don't use, such as RSCT. They can be obtained from the repository but aren't applicable to us.

In addition to the standard licensing fees, we pay for Smart Management. This gets the Satellite and Insights features, which I recommend.

Overall, their subscription, process, and repository make for a streamlined purchase and installation process.

We did not evaluate other options before choosing Red Hat. This has been the operating system in place since before I started with the company.

One of the new features in RHEL version 8 is AppStream. We're still doing our RHEL 8 deployments and although we've started using AppStream, we haven't gotten very deep into it. Its use is on a very limited scope. RHEL 8 is about halfway through its lifecycle and we're still trying to see how it works.

When it comes to the deployment of cloud-based workloads, this solution helps to automate activities. We are just starting our cloud journey and as such, we currently don't have any cloud-based workloads. However, we plan to, and my understanding is that it will be much easier using Red Hat Gold images for Azure, AWS, etc.

My advice to anybody who is implementing this solution is to automate as much as possible. Overall, I think that this is a good product. I'm a pretty big proponent of Red Hat and in fact, as we speak, I'm wearing a Red Hat RHEL 8 shirt. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I use the solution every day to check the health of the system. It tells me if there are any issues to address or if there are any security vulnerabilities. It allows me to do remediation online, which is very helpful.

The product helps keep our patches up to date and ensures that security issues are addressed in a timely manner.

It identifies bugs and security vulnerabilities.

Sometimes, the product has outages that affect the site's ability. I've had open tickets only to find that they've had problems. There should be a status page that informs users about any internal problems within the sites. This way, I can easily determine if the issue lies with them and not with my tenant.

The product should provide more online documentation to explain the available options better.

I have been using the solution for one and a half years.

The product is stable but changes so frequently that the dashboard and features constantly look different. I rate the product’s stability a six or seven out of ten.

The solution is highly scalable. We have a relatively small footprint. We could expand if we were a larger organization. I rate the scalability a nine or ten out of ten.

Support is pretty good. I rate the support team a seven or an eight out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup was only a matter of installing the agents on the server and having them communicate back to the product. The only problem we had was firewall issues on our site. Now we have one server through Red Hat Satellite instead of individually reaching out to Red Hat Content Delivery Network. It eliminates a lot of firewall issues.

If you have a subscription to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Insights is free.

I have opted to use the latest version of the product. If you have a subscription to Red Hat, there's no reason not to use Red Hat Insights. Therefore, everyone with a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription should use Red Hat Insights. It’s a valuable product, and only a small amount of effort is required to set it up. Overall, I would rate the product a nine out of ten.