Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

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.

I work for an IBM business partner and we install Red Hat for our customers. They use Red Hat for databases, application servers, and some IBM applications that we also install. There are different uses.

RHEL gives our customers the abilities and security of an enterprise application. It's an enterprise operating system with enterprise support. The benefits are the stability of the product and the support for problem-solving.

It has also enabled our clients to centralize development and it is integrated with a lot of Red Hat tools. We have a customer with OpenShift and other products from Red Hat and it helps to centralize and coordinate the development in their environment. It makes things easier and their productivity is higher.

We also use Red Hat Insights. It's a good tool and it helps us keep the installation up to date and have a global view of what we have. In addition, Insights provides vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance, and those features have helped increase uptime.

The security it provides is one of the most important features, as are the support and the documentation. The latter helps me to do everything. 

The features included in the Red Hat environment enhance the security that Linux has by default. They're good enough to secure the system. It's very complex but it's flexible and it gives you the opportunity to deploy good security. These features reduce risk.

We use it in a hybrid environment. We have it on-prem and also in the cloud. It offers good security in such an environment. The security is well-defined and I would evaluate it positively in this type of setup.

Also, the containers and the application are totally exportable to other Linux distributions. It's very open. I haven't found any compatibility issues with other Linux distributions.

The Cockpit interface needs improvement with more features. The information for implementing Red Hat Cluster could be also improved. And there could also be better performance monitoring.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for eight or nine years.

It is very stable and that is one of the features we most appreciate about it.

It's scalable.

We are quite satisfied with the technical support of Red Hat. Perhaps they could improve on their response times, but it's quite good.

Positive

We use Ubuntu and SUSE. We switched to Red Hat mainly for the enterprise support that we receive, the documentation, and the container integration.

Deployment is easy. It's very intuitive and it is well explained in the documentation.

The time it takes depends on the application, but the operating system takes a few hours to deploy and do the initial configuration. In two hours you can have a system up and running.

Generally, we start with the requirements. We have a pre-production environment and we test the strategy there. We prefer container applications, so one of the strategies that we follow is that, if it is possible to install the application container, we do that.

It can be deployed by one person like me. I am an architect but I could be a system engineer certified by Red Hat. The solution requires maintenance such as periodic upgrades to stay up to date. We have two or three people involved in that process, including patching application, compiling the product, and updating the application and the operating system, when needed to stay current and to be compatible with the next new features.

We have deployed it in various locations and we have also deployed it in IBM Power Systems as well as in some databases. We have an application server installed there and some IBM applications.

We use resources from Red Hat support. That's usually enough for us.

The pricing of RHEL is very similar to other offers. We like the model that Red Hat makes available for subscription and support. There are some free parts, subscriptions that facilitate solution development and implementation, and then, when the solution is well-defined, we move into the paid support license. That kind of subscription is a good approach.

The overall cost of RHEL versus its competitors is comparable. It's more or less the same as SUSE. But the support from Red Hat is better than you get from the others.

Compare the documentation and the answers that are published by Red Hat. Review these aspects and that should help you decide.

I strongly recommend RHEL as it fits well in on-premises or cloud development, whether for a small or a large company, and it's a professional product. It's very integrated with container technology, including with Podman and Docker, although we recommend Podman for containers. RHEL fits well in a lot of situations and container environments. It's a good product.

Our business is primarily focused on software development. We are doing development and deployment using containers. We are mainly using Docker, but we might also adopt Podman later.

Our business logic is mainly for our own software development. We mainly have Java applications, Java containers, Tomcat, and Java frameworks. These solutions cater primarily to our business-level operations.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premises.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux gives us a standardized way of handling various tasks. Everything is the same in our environment.

It gives a standard procedure to do everything. It also gives standard APIs and a stable environment.

It works very well for our business-critical applications because of its stability and support. We have some kind of support in terms of the life cycle of the operating system.

Its long lifecycles, updates, support, and documentation help with business continuity and compliance. With reference architectures, we can straightaway get working solutions.

We can rely on security features like SELinux and run several workloads for WordPress and so on. We can rely on Red Hat.

We have used Red Hat Insights for certain things, and it has been helpful.

Stability, support, and life cycle management are valuable. We get fixes quickly. We can rely on them for features and so on. We can rely on their support. In the case of an issue, we can get somebody on the phone.

Red Hat could offer a containerized version of the operating system, potentially moving towards a more containerized ecosystem. 

More flexible tools for dealing with complex things like SELinux would also be beneficial. Its built-in security features are good, but they are quite complex to manage at an atomic level.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 25 years. We are mainly using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, but we also have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and 8.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very stable. However, sometimes, there might be some load balancing issues leading to performance issues, so we have to figure out all those. Usually, Red Hat tools are helpful for that.

With automation, we have been able to handle scaling efficiently. We are using an internal cloud, which suits our needs without relying on OpenShift or VMware.

The support from Red Hat is very good. We have collaborated with Red Hat remotely and have been satisfied with the assistance provided for our customers' cases.

Positive

The pricing is suitable for midsize to large companies, though small enterprises might struggle. It is comparable to Windows licensing.

I would advise considering the lifecycle and support that Red Hat offers. They provide long-term support and have best practices for addressing vulnerabilities and attack vectors.

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

I use the solution for research purposes. 

The solution provides more detailed control. 

The product's built-in security features when it comes to simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance can be a tedious topic. It varies from user to user, however, it offers a lot of rapid releases. It helps us to simplify risk reduction and maintain compliance.

The portability of applications and containers built on the product when it comes to keeping your organization agile is good. It's easy to use.

It enhances our security. It helps us comply with company regulations.

When it comes to ensuring availability across physical virtual and cloud infrastructure, it's been okay so far.

It helped us to avoid emergencies due to security issues.

I consider the solution to be sufficient. I do not use it too much and therefore do not see any underlying problems with the solution. 

It's sufficient and it doesn't need new features. However, as new technologies enter the market, I hope they will keep up with the changing market.

From a product point of view, it's very efficient for servers. However, the solution is complex in terms of its architecture. It could be simplified. I'd like to see them introduce PDFs or documents to better explain technicalities to new users. 

Memorizing commands can be a bit tedious.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The product has been stable so far. 

The solution is deployed to the data center, which is managed only by a few teams. 

About 150 people are using the solution. We also have 45 to 50 administrators as they are managing different areas.

The solution is scalable. However, I'm not sure if we plan to scale further in the future.

I have not interacted with support very much. 

I was involved in the deployment. The initial setup was very straightforward.

The deployment is fast and the process is efficient. 

I did a lot of the implementation myself. 

I did not evaluate other options. 

I'd rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

I'd advise new users to learn from someone who has done everything before. It's much easier than trying to learn by yourself from scratch. They should also have their own environment for testing. 

We use the solution for deploying middleware applications and many different applications that we have, like the ones we can use in the marketplace with different users. We use other kinds of solutions in many of the applications we develop. But in general, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Benefit-wise, the product is very stable. The product is also very compatible, and many people want to use it.

There are a lot of features in the solution. Red Hat Insights is one feature that we rely on currently.

The model, specifically the consumption model, is an area that needs improvement in the solution.

We had a really big challenge striking a chart between on-premises and the public cloud. The approach is that you pay as you go in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. In general, you pay for whatever you use instead of preparing for a full year.

At times, language is a barrier when it comes to support. That's one of the aspects I would like to improve about the solution.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for six to eight years. My company has a partnership with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat's support is good. Sometimes cases take a little bit longer to resolve. If you are clever enough to upgrade the case and put it at a very high level of priority, then it gets resolved faster. In general, the support is good. I rate the support an eight out of ten.

Sometimes, a customer doesn't speak English or we need people who speak Spanish for the case to be easier to understand. In those cases, we lose time. I can't push all my engineers to learn to speak English. My customers and our engineers speak Spanish.

Positive

We've been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux since the beginning.

I was involved in the deployment a long time ago. The setup process is easy. The solution is also easy to use.

Regarding the time taken for deployment, we can do it with a machine at this moment using Ansible. In our orchestration, we passed more or less, creating one machine for Red Hat and the entire environment. It took us eight days and an hour. At this moment, we can deploy it on a machine in an hour with all the security. If a developer comes to us and tells us that they need a new machine or new instance, we can provide that in an hour on-premises. In the cloud, we have to use a lot of tools.

I have purchased the license via hyperscalers and transferred it as well. I purchased the license from the marketplace and also from Red Hat.

Pricing is something that can always be better.

We have not evaluated other options since we trust Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I am running my workloads on-premises and on the cloud. I mainly use AWS.

Resiliency-wise, the solution is very good. It's good because we don't have a problem with our environment at this moment. When we don't have a problem, we don't need to explain what is to be improved in the solution. It is reliable and doesn't break or bring us any problems.

Regarding how easy or difficult it is for me to move workloads between the cloud and my data center using the solution, we don't have problems. In general, it's easy.

We are talking about moving applications from on-premise to the cloud. We need to see if that represents any cost savings. We would need to go through a migration process, and that would be an extra cost.We would need to see if that is beneficial.

I rate the overall solution a nine out of ten.