Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves as the foundation for our cluster infrastructure, allowing us to deploy applications and connect servers. We further enhance operational efficiency by deploying Kubernetes on top.

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its stability and well-rounded features and its proven track record of decades of reliable operation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features and mandatory access control help to mitigate and secure the OS from threats.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is well documented and anyone with a technical background can easily understand and use the OS.

Red Hat's image builder is helpful.

Building upon the industry's 95 percent adoption of Linux OS, our Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Kubernetes setup has helped our operations.

We have not encountered any downtime while using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables us to achieve security standards certification.

The performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is consistent between on-premises and cloud deployments. The key difference is simply a shift from owning hardware to renting cloud space for the operating system.

Red Hat is open source, so what we get with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is valuable support that is not included in the free version.

Recently, whenever we have applied a Red Hat patch, we have encountered errors requiring additional work. Unfortunately, the release notes for these patches are not always updated accurately, creating further challenges during troubleshooting. Specifically, the notes often fail to mention dependent packages that are also updated alongside the main package.

While the OS hardening feature is helpful, it could benefit from additional automation. A one-click package for hardening all files would significantly improve efficiency compared to the current manual process, especially considering the hundreds of files we've processed over the years.

The support has room for improvement.

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

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is deployed across multiple locations in our organization with 95 percent of our employees that use it.

To ensure optimal performance and security, we must prioritize installing operating system updates as they become available.

Taking the Red Hat administration course beforehand will significantly ease the user experience when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We have an older environment with a lot of servers. They are development servers for a lot of in-house development. We have a lot of things. We have Ruby on Rails, Java, and a lot of Oracle applications

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is mostly on-prem in my current job. In my previous jobs, we have had it on AWS or Azure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features are good when it comes to simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance. It is something that they do very well. It is one of the reasons why we like running it. It is rock solid in all areas. Red Hat does a really good job of keeping on top of vulnerabilities and making the patching process easy.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has impacted our uptime and security. We have had no breaches, and our systems are usually up.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not yet enabled us to achieve security standards certification because that is not a requirement for where we are, but I am pretty confident that we would meet those standards. Our security teams are usually chasing problems on the other side of the house.

I like most of the features. I like its stability. I like its views. It provides a very stable environment. There is not a lot of downtime. There are not a lot of issues. Primarily, we are deploying things and configuring things, and occasionally, we add new things for developers as needed, but it does not require much troubleshooting or break fixing. That is rare.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is another thing I like about it. It is particularly easy to find an answer to your problem online. There is very good documentation, very good user communities, and good support when you need it.

The upgrade procedures are a little bit cumbersome. It would be nice if they are not because every three or four years we have to update, and I find that to be a bit on the cumbersome side. We have been able to automate most of it, but we still run into things where the job does not finish. There are things that require additional steps. There are things that need to be removed and that always require manual intervention. I do not know how they can get rid of that, but it is cumbersome in an environment where you have hundreds or thousands of servers.

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

I would rate their support a nine out of ten. I just do not give tens. I am sure there are some areas where they can improve, but they are good. They are responsive.

Positive

I have got experience with Windows and Solaris before that. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is my favorite. With Solaris, that stream stopped a long time ago, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux has all of the nice things about it, and they have continued to develop and build many new things. For instance, when you had to patch on a Solaris box, you had to take the server down into single-user mode and apply the patching. I like it better than Windows in every way. It is more intuitive to me. I like that I can do more things from the command line. It is easier to automate things.

I have been involved in the upgrades and some migrations for migrating things from Solaris. We also had CentOS, which was converted to DevStream, so we have had to change those to Red Hat. The upgrades and migrations were not terribly difficult. Usually, the tools were there. We called support when we ran into problems, but for the most part, it worked.

I have used Convert2RHEL. It was a bit helpful. It did the job.

We mostly use Ansible for deployment, patching, and managing the system in general. Our experience has been good. I am looking at some of the newer things they have at the conference that we have not had a chance to play with, but it meets our needs.

We have seen a return on our investment. We are able to do what we need to do without any problems or interruptions, and we are able to do it quickly.

For me, it is not too bad, but my company pays the bill, so I do not worry too much about it. 

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

We use the product to host operating systems, applications, or infrastructure for our customers. Our customers use the product as a long-term solution that they don't have to upgrade every other year. They can get people that know the solution from the get-go.

The biggest feature is the longevity of the distribution. Compared to any other product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a stable backported solution for a long time. It is important because we have moved a lot of software containers. We want to update it but don't want to unless we have to. So it's great to have something stable for a long time.

The biggest thing that the solution could introduce is an even slimmer version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are moving to containers, but we also have a lot of void loads that don't go into containers. It would be nice to have an even thinner operating system. Even if you choose minimally, you still get a lot of useless stuff you don't need.

I have been using the solution for 20 years.

I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

It's really difficult to get to someone that knows something. When you get to the right people, support is really good. But there are a lot of people that can only answer first-level questions.

Neutral

We're using a lot of different OSs. We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because we are a partner.

It's pretty simple to install the product. However, some tools required to install it are missing.

The pricing is great for virtual systems. The pricing for physical systems is way too high.

The overall costs depend on the project and the company.

We continuously evaluate other options. The main difference between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other solutions is the complete ecosystem's longevity and possibility. Other products may present something similar, but they don't have the ecosystem around them.

We probably purchased the solution from a cloud provider. We are using versions 5 to 9 currently.

The solution’s built-in security features are pretty good, but it's not something that I would take as a major selling point. The portability is good because we have a stable baseline for applications and containers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s security posture is pretty good. I don’t know if it's the strongest selling point, but it's up there.

In some ways, Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables us to centralize development. However, that's not mostly what we focus on. The primary output from Red Hat Insights is targeted guidance. Targeted guidance has not affected our uptime much.

It makes sense to go with a stable distribution compared to others. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

As a whole, our organization is using it on Bare Metal on-prem and the private cloud, and then also in more than one public cloud environment. We probably have all three cloud providers. We definitely have Azure and Google Cloud. The environment that I support has about 40 apps in one cloud or another, but the organization as a whole definitely has hundreds of apps in Google Cloud or Azure. They're predominantly in Azure. The Google Cloud adoption is pretty recent compared to our Azure utilization.

I'm supporting a capital markets environment. A substantial portion of my environment is still Bare Metal at Colos. I'm sure on the application side, there's plenty of JBoss in our environment. There have been recent conversations around OpenShift on-prem that I'm working on, and our enterprise cloud teams are looking at or are using ARO in the cloud. In the next year, our use of the Ansible Platform will go from zero to full throttle as quickly as we can make that happen. We found the event-driven Ansible very interesting.

They've helped us work on employing technologies suitable to our various use cases. We're pretty slow adapters of containers, but that seems to be changing fairly quickly at the moment. That certainly gives us portability for workloads. They helped us with some aspects there, and they've helped us with a lot of automation conversation at the summit this week as well around Ansible.

When it comes to resilience in terms of disaster recovery, the operating system is robust. If it fails, it's probably an app issue. The majority of work in any of our DR scenarios is dependent on whether we have got cold standby or hot standby. If it's hot, the data replication is already there, and things are already spinning. Maybe it's on or you turn it on. Other times, you may have to start up something. Nearly all of those things are application architecture decisions as opposed to dependencies or things from an OS perspective, but in terms of the ecosystem for managing our Linux environment, using Satellite and so on has been very good.

I prefer it to Windows because of the level of configuration, level of control, and the ability to see the performance of processes on a given system. I prefer the control over logging and the ability that logging gives you to investigate a problem.

Its community is also valuable. It's open source, and Red Hat-supported streams are also valuable.

The level of communication we've got with them is fantastic. 

The integration with the apps and support could be better.

A colleague was talking about having some recommendations for the Ansible Cloud on the console and having some way of identifying your dev or prod path and whether you've got read or execute access to a playbook. There were different things like that, and they made a lot of sense, especially if you're in a dev or prod environment because mistakenly running something in prod would be a huge issue. There could be something that Red Hat configures, or there could be a text field where organizations can add labels to a part of the console to distinguish that for themselves. Those would be things that would be useful. I can't imagine it's hard to implement but being able to know which environment you're in matters a ton.

As a part of my professional career, I've been using it since 2004. I joined my current organization in 2018. It has been almost five years since I've been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the security environment of our organization.

It's stable. We rarely have our systems crashing.

It's pretty easy and getting easier. It's not an OS issue. In terms of scalability, even while running our trading apps, we don't run into limitations related to the OS. Our limitations are more hardware-defined, and even then, we're running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on servers with eighty cores and almost a terabyte of RAM, and the OS doesn't have any issues.

Their knowledge base is great. There are lots of times when we don't even have to open a support case because we find what we're looking for.

I've spent a lot of time with the Red Hat account team over the past nine months. They've helped me understand products. They've helped develop the skills of my team. They've helped us with technology conversations with other parts of my organization. They've been hugely supportive of the technology conversation we're having with other parts of the bank.

They've been over and above the expectations in most cases. I'd rate them a ten out of ten. I don't know if it could be better. It has been extremely good. They've been extremely helpful in reaching out and figuring out what they can contribute. The account manager that they have working with us is a former colleague, so it's a really smart decision because we have a very good relationship with the guy. He knows our environment. It has been extremely positive.

It's a growing relationship with Red Hat. We have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a very long time, and I don't know if we can even compare it to the other OS vendors, but having the account team working with us with that level of experience with our environment helps them work with us. It helps us accomplish what we're trying to do. It has been a very good partnership.

Positive

We get our licenses directly through Red Hat.

We haven't used the image builder tool or insights, but it's something that we might explore in the coming months. 

I'd rate it a ten out of ten. It's very customizable and very supportive. It never seems to crash. There could be better integration with apps, but from an OS perspective, it's excellent.

Our organization uses the solution as a scientific workstation for forecasting, data collection, data presentation, and delivery of products in the form of bulletins or images to the general public. 

We have five to ten scientists who work on installations at any given time. We need a pretty powerful but flexible cluster system to operate and develop applications for general maintenance. 

We have over one hundred sites so we need something that is efficient. We use Smart Management to distribute packages and Ansible for some of our remote, repeatable management tasks.

The solution is very good and the best choice for us because it is quite versatile and familiar to staff. It has its own quirks from time to time, but by and large, the solution has been very reliable and useful for our purposes.

We operate in a high-security environment and the solution's security profiles meet our standards.

The solution is very versatile with an intuitive, easy-to-use interface and a wealth of available applications.

The flexible and extensive system makes it easy to cluster, check redundancies, and perform data backups. 

The solution's open source aspect is appealing because it invites collaboration. 

The operating system might not be able to handle big scientific problems which require a highly parallel system and symmetric multi-processor to run logic streams simultaneously. 

I have been using the solution for twelve years.

I have used Linux since the 1990s. I started with Unix in 1979 as a student at Hopkins. I liked that Unix treated everything as a file and had a very consistent interface. 

Linux lived up to the spirit of Unix because of its core operating system that is modular with the basics and supports additional functionality as plugins. 

The solution is very stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Technical support is responsive and very good. I rate support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

Ten years ago, I used VMS and AIX depending on the project. 

My job right now is on analytics-based systems so I use the solution. The organization has used it for twenty years. 

The setup was completed twenty years ago so I do not have details. 

The solution is easy to troubleshoot if you have familiarity with Unix systems. Any system of this scale will require maintenance but it is relatively straightforward. 

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We run IT and telco workloads and applications on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helped us centralize development. We use a complete ecosystem of Red Hat for end-to-end development, deployment, and operations. 

Centralizing development is achieved as we have clearly defined platforms to host applications, like OpenShift. 

Additionally, the ACS on top of containers scans to ensure they are compliant, reducing vulnerabilities within our software.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a standardized environment with Kubernetes and good support behind it. The end-to-end delivery for developing, testing, and deploying containers in the same ecosystem is a very valuable feature. 

The built-in security features are fine, we don't receive complaints about them.

One area for improvement is dealing with specifics developed by Red Hat Enterprise Linux that are now end of life. We have to remediate these changes, which is a disadvantage. 

Additionally, better comparisons between different stack providers in pricing and functionalities could help, especially since public clouds often appear less expensive during planning but are more costly in practice.

I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux personally since joining my company ten years ago. Within the company, it has been used for more than 20 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux performs quite well for business-critical applications. Although we have some outages, it's not unusual, and I cannot blame RHEL entirely for it.

Scaling Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS is smooth and without complaints. We are planning to widen its use by moving from OpenStack to bare metal according to Red Hat's roadmap.

The customer service rating varies at around an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

They conducted tests with Ubuntu. That said, it was less expensive and not as stable or developed as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

There is a return on investment since we can host our applications on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is quite expensive, yet the technical support, available roadmaps, and services justify the cost. We receive value for the price we pay, including technical support, which enables business continuity and compliance.

We evaluated Ubuntu, but it was less stable.

I would advise trying it out to see for yourself. Red Hat provides great technical support. That said, the pricing may need careful evaluation, especially when comparing with public cloud offerings.

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

As a system administrator, I specialize in building infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with a focus on automation from initial design through to implementation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has significantly helped our company grow by enabling automation, allowing us to provide multiple services simultaneously and reduce repetitive tasks through the creation and sharing of solutions with other teams.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enabled us to centralize development.

Ansible is one of my most-used tools, and I especially appreciate its automation capabilities.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers many valuable features, some, particularly the latest ones, are not immediately available until deployed on-premises. Additionally, although I need to become fully acquainted with its built-in security features, the dashboards could be enhanced to provide more comprehensive security insights.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable. I've never had any problems with its stability.

The scalability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is.

The customer support and technical support are good. Normally, I can find my own solutions and if not, I can reach out to the vendor for assistance.

Positive

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

We face restrictions in accessing the latest features for various tools, including Elastic and Red Hat. For instance, we cannot utilize certain Elastic features because they are not publicly available. Similarly, with Red Hat, we must wait for the newest features to be released on-premises before we can access them. This limitation hinders our ability to leverage the most up-to-date technology.

The key advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux over other open-source Linux distributions is its comprehensive support, which includes access to updates, security patches, and technical expertise.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run Oracle Databases for CC&B and JDM. All the RHEL stuff is on-prem. The CC&B team manages the customer care and billing stuff, but we take care of the operating systems, and the application users manage the applications. We have 200 to 300 users on RHEL. 

We are missing random devices for patching and everything, and we don't have the Linux data license for that. If we had that, life would be much easier. Right now, we patch using Yum updates and we manually do configuration changes from our end.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux improves our security. On our end, we only use the console to reboot the server and apply security. We patch it completely if we have any security updates. Every quarter, we run a report using quality and whatever it was pulling. That's what we are patching. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes patching and scripting much easier, and it provides all the features I need for patching and VM updates. It's easy to apply Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features when it comes to simplifying risk reduction or maintaining compliance.

For phone support, we had to buy a license for all our servers, and it was a bit pricey for us. 

I have used RHEL for 21 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is highly stable. We've never had any problems or crashes. It's very smooth from our end.

It's easy to scale Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Right now, we're discussing what will happen a year from now, when we plan to increase our usage. 

I rate Red Hat customer service eight out of 10. Their knowledge base is fantastic. You can easily find whatever you need. Their support responds immediately, whereas we struggled with support from Oracle. 

We were using Oracle Linux, and I don't see much difference except the support. We were not getting good support from Oracle because it took too long whenever we opened a ticket. Oracle was also too expensive, and patching is much easier with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We were not looking for more features. Oracle Linux has a lot more packages than we need.

Setting up Red Hat Enterprise Linux was straightforward. You need at least two system admins to do so. Migrations and upgrades are also easy. Our main products are CC&B and JDM, with an Oracle database on the back end. We were highly satisfied with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for migrating all of those. We also have other solutions like SQL Server, which is on the Windows operating system.

Performance-wise, this Linux is better because you can ignore some packages if you don't need them. 

Oracle Linux is free, but we were having many other issues with it.

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux nine out of 10. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very easy to install and manage.