Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run our GS and PSP applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us avoid cloud vendor lock-in.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helped us save on costs. 

The support and the stability are Red Hat Enterprise Linux's most valuable areas.

Upgrading between versions needs to be easier. For example, if we have Red Hat Seven running now and a Java exploit is found on Red Hat Seven, we need to be able to upgrade to Red Hat Nine online without any downtime in the environment. This is because it is not possible to reinstall the environment from Red Hat Seven to Red Hat Nine in production without causing downtime to the applications. Red Hat needs to have tools that ensure that we can upgrade from Red Hat Seven to Nine online without any issues.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extremely stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scalable. We have around 1,790 end users.

The technical support is quick to respond.

We previously used Proxmox and switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of the price.

The initial setup is straightforward because it is well-documented. The deployment time depends on the application. A small application can take around 20 minutes.

The implementation was completed in-house.

The cost is based on each organization's budget and infrastructure.

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

The ease of moving workloads between the cloud and our data center depends on the application architecture. If the application has a monolithic infrastructure, it may be easier to move to the cloud. However, if the application is already running mostly in the data center, it may be more difficult because we would need to recreate all of the infrastructure and topology from scratch. This is because there are so many parts to consider when migrating a microservices-based application to the cloud.

For someone who wants to use an open source Linux operating system, I would recommend Rocky Linux. However, they should be aware that open source solutions do not come with the same level of support as Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Four network team members are required to maintain Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The Red Hat knowledge base is good and well-documented.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the only Linux solution that is supported for enterprise-level organizations. I recommend this solution for large organizations that want professional support for their Linux systems.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for servers. We have deployed application servers and database servers on it. We run Oracle Database, WebLogic, Apache, and JBoss on it.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very important for our organization. We are very sensitive to security.

It is not difficult to move workloads between the cloud and the data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Mostly, our teams use file servers centrally, and then they use scripts so that it is done automatically in the background. Initially, they may get problems while connecting due to the security or firewall, but once the connection is established, we do not see any problem with that.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped to avoid cloud vendor lock-in. I am not sure how much our organization has saved in costs by avoiding cloud vendor lock-in, but we would have saved a good amount.

It is very stable and robust. My team is very comfortable working with it for all end-to-end activities. They can work with it very easily. They prefer working through the console rather than the GUI.

Its resiliency is good. There is no doubt about that.

I don't prefer Red Hat Enterprise Linux for desktop over other options. 

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a good amount of time. It has been eight to ten years.

It is very stable. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of stability.

It is very scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten in terms of scalability. It is highly available and scalable for servers.

It is good. I do not see any challenges. I would rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We choose an operating system based on the needs and the use case. We use different operating systems for different purposes, so they are not comparable. For example, for desktops, Linux is not the best. For desktops, Microsoft Windows is the best. Similarly, if you are using any Microsoft products, such as SQL Server, Microsoft Windows is the best option. However, nowadays, we also have Microsoft products installed on Linux.

I am not involved in its deployment and maintenance. We have a separate team with 40 to 50 people around the globe for that.

We most probably have both on-premises and cloud deployments on a private cloud, but I am not sure. Our infrastructure services team takes care of that.

We have got a good ROI, but I do not have the metrics. I would rate it an eight out of ten in terms of ROI.

Its pricing is good and competitive.

I would recommend it based on the use case and the budget. If it meets your needs and budget, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the best option.

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

RHEL is a phenomenal operating system for three primary reasons: 

• Support compared to the rest of the Linux ecosystem
• Cohesive ecosystem 
• Application platform

The combination of these three aspects has proven to me from an advising perspective that it is key in decision-making.  

Our clients purchase the use cases via cloud provider and hyper-scale. It's a combination of both. Mostly, new clients prefer going for hyper scalers. Whereas the clients with Red Hat licenses, predominantly those from the banking sector, transfer the licenses to the cloud depending on their hyper scaler plan.

The main benefits my clients have seen are the supportability, maintenance of the operating system, security, and the ecosystem that ties it all together.

The solution has a phenomenal operating system. Its support features are best compared to the rest of the Linux ecosystem. Generally, applications don't rely on operating systems per se. When combined with the container ecosystem, security is the paramount feature that is most asked for.

The problems our clients try to solve by implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux vary. The main ones include containerization, cloud transformation, and visual transformation in terms of how you get to the cloud in a hybrid mode. The key aspect that I give advice about is how for the operating system in terms of the scalability to bridge the cloud to the on-prem world, so where they could have the OpenShift ecosystem that it runs into and helps them manage both systems together. 

The solution's operating systems are phenomenally resilient and stable. The good part is that Red Hat has backing and support. Also, combined with IBM, it gives more confidence to my customers.

The solution's ecosystem is good but it would be better to create cohesive components in all of the development tools. 

A developers' hub feature would help. 

OpenShift already provides excellent visibility, but bridging the gap with Kubernetes would be key because Red Hat Enterprise Linux drives OpenShift.

I'm a big open-source user. I've been using different forms of Linux for quite some time. For my enterprise purpose, I use the RHEL for other purposes and a few other different Linux operating systems. We have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for more than ten years.

I have experience working with Ubuntu, Fedora, Canonical, etc. From that perspective, the solution's stability is good. The security feature plays a key role in terms of the pace at which it receives updates for operating systems to maintain it.

In terms of the architectural perspective, the nature of the solution is scalable.

The solution's technical support is very good. My clients generally manage it, and I have received positive feedback. They have a responsive support organization to communicate with.

I have used Canonical and Ubuntu. In comparison with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu's ecosystem consists of multiple operating systems and container platforms like MicroK8s. The partnership with hyper scalers in terms of deployment is one of its benefits as well. On the flip side, it has some drawbacks regarding licensing and export control, where Red Hat shines well.

The solution's pricing and licensing are good. Although the open-source space is becoming more competitive, Red Hat brings value in terms of support. At the same time, different operators like Canonical Kubernetes are catching up. Thus, the price would become the differentiation factor regarding packages for support, and container ecosystem combined with Ansible. All these key elements would add more value to the pricing.

The solution's key element is its cohesive ecosystem between hybrid and cloud environments. It helps clients such as giant banks create a single space for managing workloads in different hyper scalers. This way, it helps in cost management and visibility. It creates a single platform to manage work. It helps in saving costs, especially with subscription plans. It provides them with a consistent cost structure. Also, being an open-source solution has benefits that fit within the ecosystem.

I rate it an eight out of ten, primarily for the support and licensing terms. It helps some of our enterprise clients navigate open-source licensing and export control complexities.

There are areas of improvement, such as the cycle of updates and the ecosystem as a whole. Also, the elements like Ansible are priced separately. For automation, there is an opportunity to combine everything. Even though they are different products, they shouldn't be charged separately from the ecosystem perspective.

Our use cases are pretty broad. We develop the automation that provisions the VMs, and then anyone in the company can request the VM for whatever intended purposes.

Red Hat Support is really good. Support has a fast response time. The product has good security. We deal with very urgent issues. The response time should be optimal if the issue requires Red Hat Support. 

My company is a utility company. Outages are a major issue for us. A faster response time is very important to get the applications back up so we can keep up with our production time. Red Hat's documentation is always really good.

As a software developer, documentation is very important to me. The solution should provide better documentation.

The solution is very stable.

The product is scalable. We're able to provide as many VMs as we like. We never run into an issue with how many VMs we are provisioning.

Support can always be improved. I rate the product’s support an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

The solution can get pretty pricey depending on how many machines we're licensing but for a good reason.

We purchased the solution from Red Hat. We use Packer by HashiCorp to build our templates. I am a junior developer. I have been employed with my company for about five months. I don't know the initial issues that led to us choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our Linux solution. I speak from a developer’s perspective because I deal with Ansible.

The product has really good built-in security. The product provides good support, which helps us manage downtime and get the service back up and running, thus producing more money.

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

Our customers use the product primarily for application servers, authentication apps, and tool servers. If a feature is available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, they're most likely using it. The product allows us to use applications that run on open-source software. The product also provides on-site support that helps us if we have any issues.

The solution is stable and reliable. Being able to move back and forth between systems, products, and middleware is a huge boon.

The solution lacks proper documentation. There have been times when I found a document that was supposed to fix an issue, but I realized it was wrong. Then, I would send it to support, and they would fix it.

Our customers have been using the solution for six or seven years.

The product’s stability is good. It has minimal downtime when it comes to generic deployments. Once you start adding complexity, there are other issues.

The product’s scalability is good. Our customers are able to scale out thousands of instances in minimal amounts of time.

The support team is great. I have friends that work on the support side. I can count on one hand the times I've been dissatisfied with support. Usually, when that happens, it's because it's something that either couldn't be fixed or something too old. I rate the support a nine and a half out of ten.

Positive

My involvement in deployment depends on which systems are being deployed. My organization constantly rolls out new systems via OpenStack, on-premise, or other cloud providers. I help build their base images.

The product’s deployment is pretty straightforward. Everything we build is automated and kicked out from there. Once the base image is built, there's really not much to do.

My customers have seen an ROI from the product. They have an on-site support team that is able to help them with issues. It is important to them to have a good team of people to reach back to and to be able to work together.

Our customers conduct market research before any purchase. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has consistently been a top contender for us and our customers. We usually support Red Hat Enterprise Linux because our customers choose it.

The biggest push towards Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the ability to have something that's supported and open-sourced. Having transparency is important to my customers. They want to see what they're putting into production, development, and testing. It is important to the customers to see what's going on and what workloads they're handling and to know that what they're putting the workloads on will be solid and secure.

Our customers use the solution on multiple cloud providers, mostly AWS and Azure. Our customers buy a yearly subscription for some equipment, and for short-lived instances, they do on-demand pricing within the cloud provider to buy the ones they offer.

I believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped our organization avoid cloud vendor lock-in. We've been able to pretty reliably and easily lift, shift and redesign our application from on-prem to the cloud. It might not necessarily be a huge benefit for us. However, it is definitely a perk, especially in an environment where we have to go through a certain purchasing cycle and background reviews for everything. It does end up helping us.

As much as I've used Red Hat Image Builder, I really like it. Though, I've only had to build a handful of images out of it. We can't use something like Fedora, where you've got a nightly update. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is tested and reliable. Having something they can work on, develop, and use daily is helpful to our customers.

The sosreports and soscleaner developed in recent years are a huge improvement. My customers tend to be pretty fixed in their ways and what they use, so they continue to work and use things for longer than they should, but that's the beauty of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is supported, and we still have the necessary reach back.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is pretty solid. It's been tested. It has its upstream counterparts that ensure that most of the bugs get worked out, and what makes it down into the final testing is strong and resilient. We've been working on moving workloads between the cloud and data center with the customers. Instead of lift and shifts, we try to redevelop their applications instead of spending $10,000 to give 32 cores in the cloud because they had 32 cores in the system.

We have a fantastic team that works with us and supports us. The team goes out of its way to help find cost savings for both us and our customers.

Overall, I rate the product 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.

It started mostly with websites and open source environments overall for development. Now, we are moving into business applications as we are migrating our ERP, which is a cp -r tree, to Linux. We are also migrating the database of SAP to SAP HANA on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

We use RHEL versions 7 and 8. There is a bit of version 6 still lying around, but we are working on eradicating that. It is mostly RHEL Standard subscriptions, but there are a few Premium subscriptions, depending on how critical the applications are.

It has fulfilled all the promises or goals of different projects, not just because our internal team is strong, but also because our external partner is strong.

Satellite is an optional system which provides for extensive deployment and patch management. That is quite valuable.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux's tracing and monitoring tools. You don't leave them on all the time, as far as tracing is concerned. When you are sick and go to the doctor, that is when you use it, e.g., when an application is sick or things are really unexplainable. It gives you a good wealth of information. In regards to monitoring, we are using them to a point. We are using Insights and Insight Sender as well as the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), which is more something we look at once in a while. 

Other Red Hat products integrate with Red Hat Enterprise Linux very well. In fact, they integrate with pretty much everything around the universe. We are doing API calls without even knowing what an API is, i.e., towards VMware vCenter as well as Centreon. There are certain individuals who use it for free without subscription and support for Ansible in our Telco group with great success.

Linux overall needs improvement. They cannot go much beyond what Linus Torvalds's kernel implementation can do. I come from AIX, and there were very cool things in AIX that I am missing dearly, e.g., being able to support not only adding, but also reducing memory and number of processors. That is not supported on Linux right now, and it is the same for the mainstream file systems supported by Red Hat. There is no way of reducing a file system or logical volume. Whereas, in AIX, it was a shoo-in. These are the little things where we can say, "Ah, we are missing AIX for that."

We are not loving our servers anymore. If we need them, we create them. When we don't need them, we delete them. That is what they are. They are just commodities. They are just a transient product.

I have been using it for nine years, since 2012.

The stability has been very good. However, there is a learning curve. We were running huge in-memory databases, about 2.5 terabytes of RAM, which is SAP HANA. Then, we were getting really weird problems, so we asked the app guys 20,000 times to open a ticket because we were seeing all kinds of weird timeouts and things like that on the OS side. We were saying, "It's the app. It takes forever." Finally, they said, "Oh yeah, we use a back-level thing that is buggy and creates a problem." It took us six months and four people to get that from the app guys. We were ready to kill them. That was not good. Whatever you put on Linux, make sure that you have somebody supporting it who is not dumb, or on any platform for that matter.

The scalability is six terabytes. That is what we're doing. We are printing HANA servers on that scale, which are more in the 2.5 terabyte range. However, we had to create one for the migration initiative on the VMware, which was six terabytes with 112 cores. It worked, and that was it. It also works with bare-metal, but you have to be aware there are challenges in regards to drivers and things.

RHEL provides features that help our speed deployment. For example, for SAP HANA, they have full-fledged support for failover clustering using Red Hat HA, which is a solution to create a vintage approach of failover clustering. They do provide extensive support for value-adds for ERP solutions.

They also provide value left, right, and center. Whenever we have a problem, they are always there. We have used both their professional services as well as their Technical Account Manager (TAM) services, which is a premium service to manage the different challenges that we have had within our business. They have always come through for us, and it is a great organization overall.

Their support is wonderful. They will go beyond what is supposed to be supported. For example, we had a ransomware attack. They went 20 times above what we were expecting of them, using software provided by them on a pro bono basis, meaning take it and do whatever you want with it, but it was not ours. That was a nice surprise. So, whenever we have needed them, they did not come with a bill. They came with support, listening, and solutions. That is what we expect of a partner, and that is what they are: a partner.

I, for one, was managing AIX, which is a legacy Unix, as my core competency. I still do because we haven't completed the migration. 

RHEL is a value-add right now. As we are migrating more payloads to containers, we are putting less Linux forethought into these container-hosting servers. You just shove your containers on top of them with your orchestrations. This may reduce our need to manage RHEL like a bunch of containers. That changes the business. 

We were paying for premium SUSE support for an initial pilot of SAP HANA on the IBM POWER platform. We were stuck between an IBM organization telling us, "Go to SUSE for your support," and the SUSE organization saying, "Go to IBM for your support." So, we told them both to go away. 

We are so glad that we haven't mixed the Red Hat and IBM more, because SUSE and IBM don't mix, and we were mixing them. That was prior to the merger with Red Hat. In regards to IBM's ownership of Red Hat, we are a bit wary, but we think that IBM will have the wisdom not to mess it up, but we will see. There is a risk.

The initial setup is as straightforward as it can get for anyone who knows what they are talking about. It does require technical knowledge, because that's what it is: a technical solution. It is not something that I would give to my mother. Contrary to other people's perception of, "My mom had a problem with her Windows. Oh, put her on Linux." Yeah, no thanks. Give her a tablet, please. Tablets are pretty cool for non-techies, and even for techies to a certain extent. 

For the migration from AIX, Ansible has been our savior. You do need somebody who knows Ansible, then it is more about printing your servers. So, you press on the print button, then you give it to the apps guys, but you do have to know what you are trying to aim for so the guy who is creating the Ansible Playbook codes exactly what is required with the right variables. After that, it is just a question of shoving that into production. It is pretty wonderful.

We do get a return on investment with this solution in regards to a comparative cost of ownership of going with the niche solution of IBM AIX systems and hardware. There is a tremendous difference in cost. It is about tenfold.

The integrated solution approach reduces our TCO tremendously because we are able to focus on innovation instead of operations.

RHEL is a great place to go. They have a great thing that is not very well-known, which is called the Learning Subscription, which is a one-year all-you-can-drink access to all of their online self-paced courses as well as their certifications. While it is a premium to have the certifications as well, it is very cool to have that because you end up as a Red Hat certified engineer in a hurry. It is good to have the training because then you are fully versed in doing the Red Hat approach to the equation, which is a no-nonsense approach.

Because it is a subscription, you can go elastic. This means you can buy a year, then you can skip a year. It is not like when you buy something. You don't buy it. You are paying for the support on something, and if you don't pay for the support on something, there is no shame because there are no upfront costs. It changes the equation. However, we have such growth right now on the Linux platform that we are reusing and scavenging these licenses. From a business standpoint, not having to buy, but just having to pay for maintenance, changes a lot of the calculations.

We tried SUSE on the IBM POWER platform, and it was a very lonely place to be in. That was for SAP HANA migration. We are glad that we decided to be mainstream with leveraging what we already had at Red Hat Linux (over a few dead bodies now). We also leveraged the Intel x86 platform, which is very mainstream. 

We are not using the Red Hat Virtualization product. We are using VMware just so we can conform to the corporate portfolio.

Our RHEL alerting and operation dashboard is not our route one right now. We have been using Centreon, which is derived from the Nagios approach, for about seven years.

With AIX, we couldn't get a single software open source to run. It was like a write-off, except for reducing a file system or logical volume in Linux.

We are a bunch of techies here. RHEL is not managed by end users. We don't really mind the GUIs, because the first thing that we do is stop using them. We are using Ansible, which is now part of RHEL, and that can automate the living heck out of everything. For now, we are not using the Power approach, but we may in the future. We are doing a business case for that, as it would be an easy sell for some communities and the use cases are not techie-to-techies.

There is a cloud, but we have very little infrastructure as a service in the cloud right now. 

It delivers to the targeted audiences. Could Red Hat Enterprise Linux be used in all types of other scenarios? Most likely. They have an embedded version for microcontrollers, i.e., things that you put into your jewelry or light switches. However, this is not what they're aiming for.

I would rate RHEL as a nine and a half (out of 10), but I will round that up to 10.

We use it for 

• some of our websites
• one of our main applications for the City of Gothenburg
• automation 
• the underlying operating system for our GitLab server.

We have many different databases running on RHEL. Among them we have MySQL and POSTGRES and they all run great on RHEL 7 and on RHEL 8.

Using this solution, we can offer our customers an easier way to get a WordPress site, and they can have POSTGRES and Tomcat installations, and these run smoother on Linux than they do on Windows.

We also use both Ansible and Satellite from Red Hat. They are integrated with RHEL and they work like a charm. The integration works great. We use Satellite for patching our RHEL servers and we use Ansible to automate the patching and deployment of config files. That means we don't have to worry that much about the patching. If we want to deploy the same config file to 100 systems, we just run the playbook with Ansible and it's done. We don't have to run it on 100 servers.

The most valuable thing for us is the support that we get from Red Hat for the product. One of our most important applications here in the City of Gothenburg runs on RHEL, so if something happens, we have a partner to get support from.

The solution has features that simplify adoption for non-Linux users. There is an interface that you can activate on RHEL systems, and on other Linux systems as well, so that you will get a graphical user interface instead of just a shell. It's easier for an administrator who is used to only working on Windows.

In terms of the deployment and management interfaces for non-Linux users and Linux beginners, for me it was quite easy to get on with Linux and RHEL. And if you're not using the Cockpit, or graphical interface, then it's a bit harder because then you have to type in everything and you don't get any visual guides. On the RHEL systems that we have, we haven't been using the desktop environment; we only just use the shell environment. But using Cockpit is much easier because then you get a visual, graphical interface.

Sometimes they don't have new versions for applications like Apache or PHP. I understand it's because they have to have support for them, so they can't have the latest version all the time, but that's the main thing I see that could be improved.

So when you use RHEL and you want to install, let's say, Apache or PHP, you do a "dnf install php" and you get a specific version that Red Hat releases. But that isn't the latest version that PHP has released, because Red Hat has to make sure that they can support it. The compatibility with the latest version of Apache or PHP lags because RHEL does not release updates of the latest versions.

It's the same with the kernel. Sometimes they are a bit behind in the kernel version. That's the same issue. They have to test it and support it for so many years so that's why they are a bit behind on the kernel as well.

We've been using Red Hat Linux (RHEL) for more than 10 years. We are using versions 6, 7, and 8.

It's a really stable operating system. It has a lifetime of about ten years per version. It's not like other Linux systems where the lifetime is about five years. It's stable and it runs for a long time so you don't have to change the operating system that often.

It's easy to scale up and scale out.

Of the people using our RHEL systems, some are system administrators and some of them are just consuming power or memory or CPU from the server. They only have websites and they don't come into contact with the underlying operating system.

RHEL accounts for about 10 to 15 percent of our servers. Our usage increases all the time.

The solution also enables you to deploy current applications and emerging workloads across bare-metal, virtualized, hybrid cloud, and multi cloud environments. We only use on-premise in our infrastructure, but you can have it on bare-metal or on cloud or multi cloud. For us, it's been running great. It's reliable.

Red Hat's technical support has been quite good. Sometimes the lead times are a bit long because most of the support is in India, it seems, so there is a time difference. But if we need to get a higher level of support, we can just bump up the priority. So that's really good. We will get help faster.

I don't think our company had a similar solution before RHEL, although that was back before I started with the company. The company started with RHEL because they wanted to have support.

Red Hat, as a company, is a big contributor to the open-source community. That's another one of the reasons that we want to use RHEL the product.

The setup was quite straightforward. It was a bit harder with the latest version, but that was because of our VMware version.

For us, deployment takes about 15 to 20 minutes. Most of the time we get someone who orders it. They want to have a website and they need a server and we will spin up a RHEL server for them in our VMware infrastructure.

For deployment and maintenance there are two of us in the company. I'm one of them, in my role as a systems analyst, and my colleague is an IT strategist, although he mainly works as a system admin as well.

In terms of the solution’s single subscription and install repository for all types of systems, we can have as many RHEL installations as we want because we have a specific subscription that entitles us to have as many RHEL services as we want. We pay for a subscription and with that we get RHEL and Satellite as well.

The best thing to do is to go to developers.redhat.com and get free subscriptions for RHEL products, so you can try them out and see how they work before you go ahead and purchase or subscribe.

As far as I know, there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We have Ubuntu, CentOS, and other types of Linux versions. The main difference between these products and RHEL is the support that we get from Red Hat. RHEL is also more capable and more stable and it is more of a well-tested operating system before it gets released.

Try the product out. If you decide to purchase a subscription, don't be afraid to submit a ticket or a support case to Red Hat, because that's why you pay for a subscription. It took us a  long time before we started to open support cases, because we thought, "Ah, we can fix this ourselves." But now we use the support system quite often and it works quite well.

One of the things I've learned from using RHEL is that there are applications that work so much better on Linux than they do on Windows.