Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We primarily use RHEL for data analysis servers supporting our scientific researchers, who access the systems remotely.

The reliability and long support lifespan of RHEL are crucial for us. It lasts for ten years, meaning we don't need frequent changes. Updates are quick, simple, and reliable, automatically backing out if issues arise, saving us from patching headaches.

I'm eager to see how the AI features in RHEL can enhance our capabilities. We hope it will improve tasks we have found challenging in the past, like documentation searches. We are particularly interested in automation and easily finding information.

I have been using RHEL for 15 years.

RHEL is scalable. We have scaled our data analysis clusters with it quite well.

I would rate the customer support as a nine out of ten.

Positive

Deploying RHEL for the first time was simple. It was a long time ago, and we had documentation from previous admins which made it straightforward. We did the deployment on our own.

We have seen ROI with RHEL. Our biggest investment is in professional development through Red Hat Summit, online training, and a Red Hat Learning subscription, which we have used for courses.

Our experience with RHEL pricing and setup costs has been good. We will be purchasing an extended license for another year.

We have used RHEL since I joined my company about 15 years ago. We have looked at other options like Fedora and Ubuntu for more up-to-date libraries, but we keep coming back to RHEL for its reliability and long-term support.

Using RHEL for containers has simplified our processes. While we, as system managers, aren't heavily involved in development, we provide RHEL containers for our developers. Overall, it has improved support for container management within our organization.

We rely on Linux for our web and file servers to ensure file integrity and service verification. Additionally, we use the host firewall regularly on all our hosts for enhanced security.

We started agile development and containers help us by making it easier for developers to teardown and recreate environments. This allows for more frequent updates, improving our workflow.

Our Red Hat portfolio reduced our cost of ownership by using RHEL Workstation instead of full server licenses where possible, saving money. We use full RHEL only on our enterprise production servers.

I would advise a colleague to check out Red Hat for its long-term support and reliability compared to other open-source Linux-based operating systems.

Overall, I would rate RHEL as a nine out of ten.

The solution offers stable distribution and is very focused on security. It's very committed to delivering security fixes. That way, we don't have to keep moving forward with new versions. 

They are very focused on security and their products are well-designed in that regard. Their delivery of fixes for all products is great. It helps us maintain compliance and helps with risk reduction.

They provide satellites as an account management solution to deliver fixes. It helps us figure out where there are security gaps in our system. They offer good compliance out of the box.

We are starting to roll out container approaches for delivering new solutions. It's still early. We are using a very simple setup and we're beginning to test OpenShift. 

The product enables us to achieve security standards certification.

We can build with confidence and ensure availability across physical infrastructures. From the OS perspective, they do have a lot of reliability features. The virtualization is being phased out (their previous solution) and now they are moving to OpenShift. We're just starting to adopt it. 

We can automate security configurations. We're using the Red Hat security ecosystem to manage logical access and security. It delivers a lot of information with regard to security and hardening and how to use its products properly with regard to security, and we try to follow those guidelines. 

Overall, they are doing a good job. We're hoping that they continue to onboard open-source products into their operating system.

I've been using the solution for about seven years.

Technical support is pretty good. It's one of the main reasons we chose Red Hat over competitors. 

Positive

We've been working with CentOS. It was used in a very limited scope. We've also used Oracle Enterprise Linux for a limited scope. Red Hat has a more solid community and certifies its products more effectively. 

We're quite experienced with the initial setup at this point. For us, the process is a standard procedure.

The product does require some maintenance. There are about four people dedicated to the technology at this time.  

They are becoming very competitive. There has been more pressure based on competition, which is healthy. They could continue to work on their pricing model. The subscription model for some products needs improvement. The automation shouldn't be combined with managed hosts. Pricing should be based on socket and not endpoints. 

We evaluated Oracle Enterprise Linux. 

I'm a customer and end-user. 

We do not use Red Hat Insights just yet due to some restrictions around sending sensitive information off-premises. We're quite limited in terms of using that feature at the moment.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We prefer Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our operating system due to its excellent support. If a business wants something, we deliver it and we prefer a Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based system because of the support. It can be a simple application to a big system. It doesn't have pre-defined roles. It's a go-to operating system. 

Our use cases for it vary from plain operating system management to handling specific tasks such as running Oracle databases or other similar applications. They include quite a broad spectrum of requirements. Also, they are not limited to predefined roles but encompass the entire operating system infrastructure.

The solution's SELinux feature is a gold standard for security. It also has the best ecosystem. 

In addition, its automation platform, ITM, is a good product and works well for us.

Some of the solution's features need to be automated. We encounter the hassle of registering the system and attaching a subscription. Our company has development teams, and we have to develop subscriptions for them. Here, having the solution up and running on the developers' machines is a bit of a hurdle. Although we can run it on platforms like Red Hat Connect but, it needs to be somewhat more accessible so developers can just download it and start with the work.

I have been using the solution for 10-15 years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable when combined with automation features. I rate its scalability a nine.

The solution's customer service is good.

Positive

I have used Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, and macOS. Initially, I worked as a Red Hat Certified Administrator in RHEL 5. Later, I began to work for its partner company. That is how I switched to the solution. It was not a conscious choice. It just evolved that way.

The solution's initial setup process is straightforward. You have to follow the steps, copy the template and multiply it.

The solution's price is reasonable. If you have a license for the support, they provide excellent services. The support team is always available for help in case of errors or system downtime issues.

RHEL’s built-in security features for simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance are good. If you keep SELinux on, it is all good. If you have a system with SELinux off for a long time, it could get you in trouble. The system will make many changes, like restoring files could break your application later. In case you resolve the problems simultaneously, it is fine. 

The troubleshooting feature of Red Hat is excellent. It can solve many issues on the machine right away. In addition, if you have an external scene, then Red Hat Insights is on. I sometimes go to this feature to see its status and what is happening. 

I don't do this on a daily basis and only check it every two weeks, but it's nice to have. I mainly oversee the high-level view of all the systems. This way, I know if the clients' machines need a patch system. 

There are some missing modules for SELinux in Ansible, like the playbook. It becomes a genuine hurdle to manipulate SELinux at the moment. I have to go to the machine, take a file to the repository, and deploy it.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

I use the solution to develop OS for our internal use. I deliver it to our internal clients, so they can use it for whatever applications they may need to use it for.

The product is very stable. The knowledge base is excellent.

The solution should improve its documentation.

I have been using the solution for 16 years.

The solution scales well.

The support is good. I would rate support an eight or nine out of ten. The documentation should be improved to make it a ten.

Positive

The deployment is very easy for me because my organization has been doing it for a long time.

The product’s resiliency is pretty good. It responds fast to security updates compared to some other closed-source vendors. 

We moved from other priority operating systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it saves us costs on the commodity hardware. Overall, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten.

My customers primarily use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for application hosting and small databases. It is used for hosting Java applications and small web servers.

Cloud-based Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployments provide cost savings. If customers are purchasing a physical server, they need to have a proper setup. They need to have a data center, cabling, and a lot of other things. For cost-saving purposes, they are going for a cloud. As an operating system, it offers the same functionality on-prem or on the cloud.

It saves money for company owners. It helps our customers save money and do things quickly. They can build servers quickly. There is a menu where they can fill in the VM name and other details and attach storage. In ten minutes, they have a server ready.

I am Red Hat certified. I train people in corporations and educational institutes. Red Hat's material is very good. Their testing system is awesome. If someone is certified in Red Hat, you know that they know it well. There are millions of videos on YouTube, but they are not always updated. On the Red Hat site, the documentation is very clear. You just need to focus and study for two to three months to get certified.

Nowadays, delays are common with their support, and it often takes time to get assistance from experienced engineers.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an excellent product, and its stability has improved significantly over time. It can operate for extended periods, like six months to one year, without issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux scales well with increasing user demands or infrastructure size. It is easily available and efficiently adapts to varying needs.

Most customers host medium-sized applications on the cloud. Storing a big application can lead to higher costs.

The technical support from Red Hat has declined over the past four or five years. It could be because there are not many skilled people. When we raise a case, it is attended by junior people or new people, which wastes two to three days. We might even have to raise the severity of the ticket. However, when senior people take ownership of the case, the support is awesome. They give proper support. This was not the case earlier, so whenever we raised a ticket, we got an immediate response from Red Hat.

Positive

The initial setup is smooth.

We have Cloud-based deployments. We are using AWS, GCP, Azure, and other cloud platforms. We also have on-premises deployment. Some customers also have a mixed deployment with the cloud and on-prem but in such environments, I have seen problems in terms of performance. For example, if my database is on-prem on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and I am storing my application on the cloud on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, whenever someone hits the website, there will be latency issues. I sorted out such issues for a customer. I suggested they migrate their server from the cloud to on-prem because their database was quite big. With a mixed setup, they were having a lot of issues in terms of performance and storing data. It was very slow. After they moved it on-prem, it was much faster. This is not a Red Hat-related issue. From the operating system side, no improvements are required. However, cloud providers need to improve their facilities.

For patching, I use Red Hat Satellite, and for configuration, I use Red Hat Ansible. Leapp upgrades are also awesome. A month back, I upgraded Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. I created detailed documentation about the procedure. There were about 14 steps. It was straightforward.

With Red Hat Insights, we can see the security threats. Red Hat Insights is integrated with Red Hat Satellite. It will be helpful from the patching point of view. It lets you do subjective analytics of servers.

I did some research on pricing a long time ago, and at that time, it was much cheaper than Windows. I do not have current details about pricing, but it is affordable.

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

We have general use cases.

It's a well-supported OS. I don't know what we'd use if we didn't have it.

Moreover, the last time I had an issue flagged with the vulnerability, I was able to go to the Red Hat website and find a patch. It worked pretty well.

The built-in security worked well when it came to solidifying risk production and maintaining compliance. The uptime or security of our systems has been pretty solid.

It helps us maintain our security standards and keeps us up to date on security. 

One of the most valuable features is the package manager because it makes it easier to keep everything up to date.

The package compatibility between different releases is a little confusing sometimes.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 10 years. 

We've also used Ubuntu. 

It's a matter of certain servers that need to be kept secure, so we chose Red Hat. 

When I order a server in our organization, it comes installed, and then they spin it up.

I am involved in the upgrade processes. The upgrades weren't complex but required some downtime. We don't normally upgrade until a particular OS version becomes end-of-life and the new one starts.

Our in-house IT department did the deployment. We have a separate IT department that leverages the training provided by Red Hat.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten because most of the information I need I could find on the Red Hat website.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for OpenShift. We run KVM and then deploy OpenShift under it. Additionally, these are my customer's use cases. 

We run it in-house for prototyping applications. Moreover, my customers utilize it to port older Solaris applications to Linux. I also use Linux on Z.

The customers would benefit from quickly identifying vulnerabilities as they arise and being able to fine-tune machines if certain features are not properly fine-tuned. 

Since we use it for virtualization, KVM has been quite valuable. It's been very solid running OpenShift under KVM. The toolset has been pretty good.

By implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the customers were getting off older hardware like Solaris. They're trying to migrate their applications off those boxes and also cost savings. They were migrating over to consolidate onto Z.

However, none of my current customers use Red Hat Insights. I'm trying to encourage them to adopt it, but since they operate in air-gapped environments, Insights needs an internet connection. I mainly work in the Federal space.

Personally, I like the terminal-based tool called Tusa for certain activities. Sometimes we just don't have a web interface available for repetitive tasks. It would be nice to have a web-based tool for Red Hat Enterprise Linux since we don't always have access to a web browser.

The stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is solid. It performs well and handles the workload effectively.

It scales well on my platform. We are running OpenShift and other machines on it, and it scales without any issues. Although, it's largely due to the platform itself.

The initial setup can be complex in certain cases, particularly when dealing with a fed customer that operates in an isolated environment. But, in other installations, it has been mostly straightforward. Red Hat Enterprise Linux could still work on making it a little more streamlined in terms of deployment.

There have been some issues we've had with portability, picking it up and moving it somewhere else.

In terms of simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is good. The customers I work with don't use them extensively. However, during the machine building process, we apply some security features at build time rather than later on. We take measures such as applying a stake during the build process. While I keep pushing the customers to use the provided tools, some of them operate in air-gapped environments, preventing them from accessing the internet for the latest rules.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is pretty good. We actually build applications on one platform and successfully deploy them on another, so that's pretty good. Overall, using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is definitely a strong set for my customers.

My customers definitely see an ROI. Especially when running it on Z platforms due to fewer processors and, consequently, fewer licenses required. They have experienced a return on investment. 

When I previously worked in a Linux shop using Tusa, it was more expensive. But I think Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become more competitive, particularly for Z platforms.

One example is the consolidation of their infrastructure, getting off of Solaris, and not paying high maintenance costs. Consolidating onto Linux, specifically Red Hat, has been helpful for one of my customers.

There are not many choices available on the system they use, probably only two or three options. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the preferred choice, especially since it is widely used in the enterprise.

The other two choices are SUSE and Ubuntu, which are commercially available systems. Honestly, no one is going to use Ubuntu because it's not popular enough. So it's really a choice between SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. SUSE has been around longer on my platform and system settings. But I think people are shifting over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux as it runs on Intel and is more enterprise-oriented.

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

I've used it primarily in federal government computing centers. However, I've also used it in private companies.

I run everything on it. I've run databases, I've run web servers, and I've run application farms - so pretty much everything. I have it for MongoDB, data crunching, and more, so it covers the gamut.

The product saved us a lot of money compared to other products, like Solaris. Also, having one OS as opposed to many OSs is nice. For the most part, the benefit for the organization is saving money compared to other operating systems and having good stability.

I'm just a tech guy, so I don't know how well it affects the organization's efficiency. However, I do find that we keep things running.

The consistency, stability, and centralized batching are great.

It is easy to troubleshoot using RHEL. Their support site has excellent references, and it's widespread, so you can find pretty much anything you want on Google.

RHEL's built-in security features and security profiles for helping to reduce risk and maintain compliance are good. I like them. We don't run the firewalls on the servers. However, we run STIG and more against them, and we do pretty well.

They don't have any huge innovations. However, they're supporting many excellent projects and integrating many excellent tools into their stack. We hope they keep doing what they're doing and keep supporting open source.

The licensing model is kind of a mess. It works, however, it could be streamlined. For example, just how they apply the licenses to servers and the solution seems like a mess, at least from my end of it.

I've been using the solution for 15 to 20 years. 

I like their stability. I like that they are gatekeeping a lot of the changes. They are not too far behind the curve. However, they are maintaining stability, which is important, especially for running businesses.

Technical support is excellent. 

I've never had any issues with their tech support.

Positive

We also use Red Hat Ansible and Satellite.

I have used Solaris, and I've used different distributions of Linux, however, not always in a professional setting.

The deployment is straightforward. 

Building out a server or building out infrastructure is simple, comparatively. Setting it up so that you can deploy multiple servers is simple. Being able to do post-install and install via Ansible is great. It's smooth.

We've been rolling out new OSs across the entire infrastructure at the scale of maybe a year or two. That said, we're getting it ready to deploy everything in a month or two, at a maximum.

There is some maintenance. For example, we have to patch all the time, however, that's true of any product. I am constantly tweaking and upgrading and making changes. That said, in terms of knocking out the foundation, I don't have to do that often, so that's good.

While it's my understanding that the solution has saved the organization money, I can't say exactly how much. I don't know the exact numbers.

At this time, we do not use Red Hat Smart Management.

The benefit of using multiple Red Hat products is that they integrate well, so I don't have to worry about fitting different Lego pieces together. They just work. I prefer Red Hat over most other solutions since I'm most familiar with it at this point and it offers consistency.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.