Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We primarily use it for enterprise software, databases, and some custom applications.

We have a stable base to deploy applications. We need a minimal amount of effort to troubleshoot problems with the applications that are related to the OS.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud, in the on-prem data center, and at the edge. We are also using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a hybrid cloud environment. It has had a positive impact. It is straightforward to deploy. There was no bottleneck.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development. The stable base that each developer can rely on is great. The consistent ecosystem of the repository makes it easy to rely on.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quick to containerize, so when it started becoming mainstream, it was easier for us to sell to upper management to start doing more containerization.

There has been a positive impact in terms of the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for keeping our organization agile. It is very portable. I do not have any issues with different ecosystems in relation to how Red Hat Enterprise Linux runs containers.

Our cost of ownership is not high. They are not very expensive. We are never surprised.

The repository ecosystem is valuable. 

I would probably focus more on a rolling release schedule. Instead of a long-term operating support of ten years, I would just have one release and keep rolling it.

In terms of security features, overall, it is lacking cohesion. There are a lot of different options, and it is hard to choose the ones that best fit our business needs without a lot of investigative work.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 11 years.

It is very stable.

It is scalable.

It takes a little bit to get to the true answer. I know there is a lot of triaging. I am sure we can improve on our end. When we open tickets, we can provide more information. There could be a way to get faster answers from Red Hat support, and we might not be providing the most upfront information needed for the ticket. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

We were not using any other solution previously.

I know of only one other player, and that is Ubuntu. There is also OpenSUSE, but I have not yet seen that personally in my career.

We have cloud and on-prem deployments. We have the AWS cloud.

On AWS, we had an EC2 instance. I clicked, and it was online. For the initial deployment, we just used the Amazon Web UI, and now, we use Ansible for deployment.

We have seen an ROI. It is fairly easy to deploy. We do not have too many issues with setting up a new environment in relation to the operating system. The bottlenecks are more related to the hardware or even setting up the cloud.

When I came in, Red Hat Enterprise Linux was already being used. It has always been there.

We have not yet fully leveraged Red Hat Insights. We are working on that. It might help with cohesion and security.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten. It is reliable for deploying applications. It has a lot of different features. I can find solutions to all my problems, and the industry support is there.

One of the valuable features is that it's convenient. 

The rest of its features are really nice.

Red Hat enables us to achieve security standards certification. We have been certified for the PPI certification last year. 

Red Hat has been good when it comes to building with confidence and ensuring availability across our infrastructure. We are really confident about the security process.

It is implemented across multiple physical and virtual infrastructures. We have applied it on most production servers. They are integrated quite well. 

We use the Red Hat system roles feature. We have been using this for automation purposes and to find some tests. 

The response could be better for urgent issues. If there's an issue with live services, they need to be faster. 

It would be nice to have antivirus services.

There should be more upgrades to the security features. 

I've used the solution for a long time. My organization has used it for more than three years. 

The stability is good. I'd rate it eight out of ten. 

The scalability is decent. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. Different teams and departments, including application and development teams. 

We do not have plans to increase usage in the future.

I'm very happy with the technical support.

Positive

We have got some other open systems like CentOS. We just have most of our production services to ReadyX from CentOS and Oracle. Red Hat is more secure. The support is very nice as well.

I joined the organization after deployment and wasn't involved in the implementation. 

I'm not sure if the solution requires any maintenance. 

I'm not really involved in the pricing or the licensing. However, it may be expensive. We have different licenses. 

We evaluated different options.

I'm a customer and end-user.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run quite a few pieces of software. It's mostly for jPOS, but we also run some Apache solutions and some security applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has streamlined a lot of the support issues. When we've had problems, Red Hat has been proactive about solving the problem with us. Support is always an issue with open-source platforms. By providing this support, Red Hat makes it much easier to adopt Linux.  

I love Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security. You can see who is trying to do what and who isn't allowed. You get an alert for that. We also use a product from Symantec on the Linux system for real-time threat detection, but I think we probably don't need that. Red Hat already has these capabilities, but the security team needs something they can centrally manage. They need to know whether the system is protected and the agent is running. 

We use it on VMware, and we have a multi-site deployment, so it's very easy to patch and keep the servers up. We use Ansible automation for patching, which has really helped with the service uptime.

I like the speed of the OS data and the ease of Ansible automation. I don't need to spend much time managing everything. The provisioning and patching using Ansible is seamless. Ansible automation gives you almost a cloud-like capability on-premise. Most of my group doesn't have cloud skills. I learned it on my own and got my Kubernetes certification. I'm familiar with the automation infrastructure, how to build the execution environment and implement the private automation hub. Others still need training.

I've used Red Hat Enterprise Linux Image Builder for testing and development, but I haven't put it into production. We have a VMware template, and we've been doing training on VMware, but we are not there yet. I think they might move from VMware to another product. They are looking at other options, such as OpenShift, but we don't have training for OpenShift yet. They should try to have a salesman come and get OpenShift training for customers. If they make training free for the customers, more would switch to OpenShift from VMware.

I use Linux on Satellite with Ansible infrastructure. It would be great if there were a universal interface to control Red Hat Enterprise Linux's policy from Satellite. It could be a dashboard showing which policies were enabled on what system and allow you to apply them from the dashboard. 

I think Red Hat training could be cheaper. A company can move fast technologically with enough training. They will be stagnant without training and remain unable to fully leverage the technology. I have been encouraging the group to get a subscription to the training course for five years, but we haven't been able to take advantage of it because of the cost. They should make it cheaper for clients and offer big discounts at scale. 

When people lacked training for the technology we use, we migrated away from it. I worry that if we don't have enough training available to the client, they will eventually migrate away from Red Hat. More affordable training on key technologies like Satellite and Ansible automation will help us retain customers on those products. Downstream it will help them migrate to the latest and greatest Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as well. 

I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2005.

I rate Red Hat support 10 out of 10. I've been very impressed with the knowledge base and the support from Red Hat. When I create a ticket, they respond and resolve the issue quickly or they point us to the correct resources. For example, we had an NFS issue with ISO, so they helped us with the mounting options. We also had an issue with IBM AIX and Red Hat integration. Red Hat referred us to the IBM support stack, and we were able to get IBM to help us out.

Positive

Initially, I used Solaris because I liked it the best, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux has improved so much that it has overtaken Solaris. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easier to use and has better documentation. I also like having the ability to use Satellite and Ansible automation to manage Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

The deployment is straightforward because we use Ansible automation to spin up a new system and install applications directly from the Ansible workflow. We were planning to have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 online last year, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 came out, so we decided to wait for a bit, and we're almost ready to upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.  The application folks still haven't had enough time and money to migrate everything over, and we need a project manager. 

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 out of 10. It comes with all of these nice tools like the Satellite automation web console. 

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. 

I use the product mostly for Red Hat OpenShift. We use the solution mainly for stability and to have a fallback within the Red Hat community.

There was a worldwide security breach, and everybody needed to patch their servers. Since we were running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the product patched a lot of it. It took a lot of effort out of our hands.

It is a complete ecosystem. That is its main feature. If you take all the latest products, it just works together.

The tool is very, very close. It makes some things difficult. On the other hand, that is what makes the product so stable. The product lags a bit behind in the market. The things we are running are pretty old. Yet again, that is why it is stable. The solution doesn’t switch with every new thing there is. The solution does not need to change that because that's what makes it good.

The product could run more recent tools and packages in the repositories. However, it might bring instability because they are new and less tested. I looked at CentOS, which was close to Red Hat. It had a system working, but a few months later, it didn't work again because the packages and contracts had changed. We couldn’t communicate anymore. It’s not desirable with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We want stability. The price we pay for it is that we run on some older features.

I have been using the solution on and off for the last 15 years.

I have no complaints regarding the tool’s stability.

The product is scalable. We use the solution all the time. We use it in multiple locations. We have two physical data centers where we run it. We run it on a few 100 machines.

The technical support is very helpful.

Positive

I have used CentOS and Debian.

The deployment is straightforward. However, there’s a learning curve to understand it. The deployment would be difficult for a newcomer, but it’s normal. We use automation tools. The deployment takes us a few minutes because we use scripts.

The solution is deployed on the cloud. However, it’s an on-premise solution from the Dutch government. We do not have control over the physical servers. We just work on virtual machines. The license fees are paid by another government agency. We take machines, and then they bill us for it.

We used some integration for the deployment. That's why it was so fast. We use a base image as the setup, and then, on top of that, we install some extra things. It’s just about cloning an image and starting it.

The solution does require maintenance, but nothing more than the usual. We need a team of four people with Linux knowledge to maintain the solution.

The product is on the expensive side.

Very early in my career, we had evaluated SUSE Linux as an alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. SUSE has its own niche market now.

We are not working in a hybrid environment. I work with the Dutch government, and the regular cloud solutions are not sufficient because of data safety.

Moving workloads between the cloud and our data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not really an issue. The network connectivity is good. The data storage is fast enough. Cloud vendor lock-in is always a debatable discussion. Whatever we do, we always get vendor lock-in. We just choose what works for us at the moment.

The cost savings are mainly in time. We don't have to figure out everything if there's a priority-one issue. We can raise a ticket with the vendor and ask them to help us. It saves us costs. The savings are mostly in time because the product is not cheap. If you compare it to a free Linux OS, the total cost savings will be about the same. Our level of stress and effort is far lower. It's the real saving.

When my Red Hat Knowledgebase account works, it works fine. However, there are some issues at my company. I cannot log in sometimes. It's not Red Hat’s fault.

Look at what your priorities are. Do you want to switch fast, run the latest stuff, and be agile? Then, use open-source tools and contribute to that community. If you work for a big enterprise and mainly want stability, choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I’m very happy with the solution. If someone is a technical person, they must get some training and an in-depth technical course on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It will help them a lot. Although it is Linux, it is very different from other open-source Linux packages.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

My organization has different departments. In my department, we mostly work with containerization. I am using Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a part of OpenShift. I use the basic package and base image of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

For scale-up in our platform, we use CoreOS as the master, and for the workers, we use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux service. From OpenShift version 4.10 onwards, we cannot use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 worker nodes. We were using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 worker nodes, so we upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. 

For OpenShift, there are some recommendations from Red Hat in terms of what needs to be used for the control plane and what needs to be used for the worker nodes. When you are using CoreOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux worker nodes, there are some difficulties in managing them. For example, when you upgrade OpenShift, you need to upgrade two times. The control plane is upgraded separately because it uses CoreOS. The control plane has a lot of certificate updates that will in turn be updated on the worker nodes, so you have one restart of all worker nodes, and then when you need to upgrade your worker nodes, there will be one more restart. 

Overall, you have two reboots in your production environment, which is an issue, but it is related to your choice of product in your environment. We have this issue because we opted to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 worker machines, whereas Red Hat recommends using CoreOS because it is pretty fast in terms of rebooting and functionality. When you upgrade the control plane, that itself will update the worker nodes, so you are done in one shot. When you need to upgrade your Red Hat Enterprise Linux machines, you need to use the Ansible Playbook. You can then upgrade to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, 8, or any other version. Regardless of the versions, you can upgrade the operating system and the OpenShift version. For this purpose and for some ad-hoc activities, we are using Ansible Playbooks.

For us, its security, management, stability, and hardening are most valuable. All of these features are better in Red Hat Enterprise Linux as compared to Microsoft Windows.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very good in terms of risk assessment. It is also good for maintaining compliance. It is better than Microsoft Windows.

From the administration perspective, I do not have any issues with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For me, it is more convenient than Microsoft Windows.

My organization has been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a long time. They have been using it before I joined the organization.

It is pretty good in terms of stability. It is a stable product. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of stability because sometimes the packages can have bugs.

Its scalability is good. I would rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability.

We never encountered any issues while using OpenShift.

I have mostly been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

I have been involved in the deployment of OpenShift. It is pretty straightforward. We just need to get the licensing, and we just need to create a pool for our containers session in Red Hat Satellite. We can do the configuration from there. It does not take long because we are adding the nodes to OpenShift. During the scale-up process, we only need to subscribe to the nodes with the Red Hat subscription. It does not take much time. If we have a good spec, the scale-up would not take much time. It would take less than twenty minutes. It is pretty fast.

In terms of maintenance, when we have the bug report, we need to do the security assessments. Over time, there might be some bugs related to some packages. At that time, if it is critical, we will be scheduling a maintenance activity on our platform. 

Red Hat provides high availability from the application perspective. You get high availability when you are using OpenShift, so when you are doing a maintenance activity on the OpenShift side, there would not be any downtime. The high availability is very good. For the end-users, there would not be any application outages if you configure your application with proper replicas. They would not even realize that there is a maintenance activity happening to the underlying workers.

It was implemented in-house.

We did not evaluate other solutions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the choice of most of the companies.

If you want to integrate with OpenShift or build an OpenShift cluster with the master Red Hat Enterprise Linux and worker Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can do that, but you need to plan your upgrade or maintenance activities. It would be better if you choose CoreOS for both. CoreOS would be a better choice in terms of maintenance activities or upgrade activities in the future. If you cannot afford that, you can go with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system, but you need to do two upgrades. You first need to upgrade the control plane and then you need to separately update your worker nodes. That is the only thing you need to keep in mind.

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

We run various application servers. We have application servers for Java and Python. We also run Postgres and different applications. We have Kubernetes, Docker, Docker Swarm, etc. We have a wide variety. 

We weren't trying to solve a particular problem by implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We've used Red Hat Enterprise Linux for so long. We used to modify the Kernel in the early versions of Red Hat, but that's not needed anymore. We are currently using versions 7, 8, and 9. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development in our hybrid cloud environment because the containers can be migrated from Red Hat Enterprise Linux to AWS. It's not an issue. There is also a Red Hat-supported programming tool called Skupper, which is a layer seven service. It's an open source product. It's supported by Red Hat, so we could use that to migrate our containers back and forth on the cloud and on-prem, which is very much needed.

Red Hat is pretty good at containing risks. We have a firewall, but we also use iptables and SELinux. SELinux has proved to be very valuable. We have certain tools where when somebody tries to break SELinux, we immediately get alerts.

We don't have a problem with compliance. We also use Red Hat Satellite. Our Red Hat Satellite server is helpful in terms of meeting compliance requirements.

We're able to modify and migrate containers and redeploy containers very easily. We do that on the Red Hat platform. We do it with other tools such as VMware. Red Hat API works very well with other vendors, so that's definitely a plus. In terms of changes, for instance, if we want to connect to ServiceNow to create a ticket in Ansible, we're able to do that without any problems whatsoever. We can create a ticket in ServiceNow. We can remediate it, and we can close the ticket on ServiceNow from Ansible. Ansible is a big part of Red Hat.

It's a rock-solid operating system. We don't need anything fancy from the operating system itself. What we need is something that doesn't crash, stays up to date, and provides the security features that we need to keep external players out.

The CVEs that come out for the vulnerabilities are very fast. We try to do patching in different tiers. Our regular patching happens once every ninety days, and then we have special iterations that need to be done, and those are on demand, or if there's a high-security risk and it's absolutely immediate.

The other thing that we like about Red Hat is the support for open source. That for us is a slam dunk.

They should work more on container documentation. The only issue that we have is that Red Hat specifically promotes OpenStack, and we don't use OpenStack. It's good if you're using OpenStack, but if you're not using OpenStack, and you're using Docker or something else, it isn't that good. Having more support for non-OpenStack would be very helpful, but, of course, as part of their business, we don't expect it.

I've been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for many years.

It's very stable.

It scales very well. We have about a thousand servers, but we could scale to five thousand servers without a problem.

Their support is good overall. It's better than some of the other vendors. The staff is very friendly. The people I've met hear and discuss issues. We're very much interested in open source, so we use a lot of open source. The engineers have been extremely helpful. 

I'd rate them an eight out of ten. I'm not giving them a ten. Some of it has to do with the time cycle, and some of it has to do with different levels of quality with the support. You could get a junior support person, and obviously, that's going to be a very different experience.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat is very good.

Positive

Our environment is hybrid. Most of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux is on-prem. For the cloud, AWS is the cloud provider, but we are using a different distro for AWS. We use AWS Linux for that. For on-prem servers, we're strictly using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. For desktops, we use Fedora.

The reason for using AWS Linux is that we only have AWS. If we use multi-cloud, for instance, if we use Azure and AWS clouds together, we would definitely need something other than AWS Linux. AWS Linux is very solid too, and our team likes it. We can download the AWS Linux version for on-premises too. I've done that. I tested it, but we're sticking with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

In the server space, nothing comes close to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I know that Ubuntu is making a big push, and some people have gone ahead and migrated to Ubuntu, but I think those are going to migrate back. There's just no comparability. They're different. They're like cousins. They're very similar in some ways, but they're very different things. You can install SELinux on Ubuntu, but why bother and why go through the whole configuration? Red Hat Enterprise Linux is more suitable for servers.

We use certain tools from HashiCorp, such as Packer, so deploying it is very simple. We have a script that runs every night, and it creates via the CI, goes up to GitLab, gets whatever it needs, such as parameters, and sends it to Packer. Packer grabs the ISO, and it creates a very specific, customized deployment. It's done with a couple of right clicks. That's it.

We've absolutely seen an ROI. It's in terms of reliability, stability, security, and usability. You name it. The use cases are out there.

The licensing structure is very convoluted. It's very confusing. We have a Satellite server, and we license it through the Satellite server, but if we didn't, we'd have to buy individual Red Hat licenses. That would be a nightmare to maintain in terms of renewing it every year and things like that. 

Overall, I'd rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten.

I work in the financial industry in Brazil and my first job was to use Linux.

We deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-prem and in the cloud. Our cloud provider is AWS. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for web applications, including the JBoss data bridge. We also have some applications for prevention and risk. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is used for most of our applications in Brazil, so it is used for almost everything.

We run our workloads and applications on AWS.

There are many Linux-based operating systems. We wanted an operating system that was mature and reliable, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the best choice for us.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a highly resilient operating system. It has a strong XFS file system, kernel, and package build.

Migrating workloads between the cloud and our data center is easy. There are no problems.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps a lot. It is very useful and has helped me to resolve the issue by looking at the documentation.

The integrity of our operational systems is very stable. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a good file system type and good kernels. It does not crash for any reason. This makes it a very stable platform for me. It is the best solution for our needs.

There was a reduction in the amount of detail provided in backlog messages between Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions six and seven, compared to versions eight and nine. This makes it more difficult to troubleshoot errors in versions eight and nine, as users must dig deeper into the operating system to find the source of the problem. Versions six and seven provided more detailed error messages, which made it easier to identify and fix problems. Deploying applications using Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions six and seven was seamless. However, there is a chance that something could be broken when deploying with versions eight and nine, and we may not know it.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since versions four and five.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extremely stable.

One of the reasons we adopted the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem is because of its ability to scale.

I have not had a good experience with Red Hat engineers. When we have an issue, it is very difficult to have it resolved in the first call. They always have to escalate the issue and involve multiple people. At a minimum, we have to escalate an issue three or four times before it is resolved. The support team in Brazil has helped me a lot because they work with me to resolve the problem, but if I have to open a ticket and follow the steps I never get proper service.

I give the technical support of Red Hat a zero out of ten.

Negative

The initial deployment is easy. I can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux myself using a base image within a few minutes both on-prem and in the cloud.

The implementation is completed in-house.

We purchased our license from Red Hat.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten.

Cloud vendor lock-in is inevitable when we adopt the cloud. This is because once we adopt a cloud service, such as DynamoDB or AWS, we become dependent on that provider for support and maintenance. It is very difficult to work with multiple clouds 100 percent of the time, as this can lead to problems with failover and other issues in multiple cloud environments because the risk is high.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem is more attractive because we are not just buying an operating system. We are buying an ecosystem that helps, supports, and secures our platform. I believe this is the better option.

Applying patches in the new versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is more time-consuming than in Oracle Linux because Oracle Linux does not require legacy environments to be patched or changed through applications.

For someone looking for an open source cloud-based Linux OS instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I recommend AWS Linux. It is a very stable version of Linux and does not require a subscription.