Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We mainly use RPM-based systems to give our developers virtual machines.

The most valuable features of using RHEL for us are the standard way to run Linux and tools like NetworkManager. They make things easier for us.

I prefer a product that offers everything in a yearly subscription, like VMware, and I think RHEL should consider offering it as well.

I have been using RHEL for 15 years.

The scalability of the solution is good.

We use RHEL deployed in different zones, only on-premise, not in the cloud. Deploying RHEL depends on the end user, but migrations aren't usually a problem due to site forwards. The hardest part is dealing with end-user applications on the machines. We use Ansible for scripting, especially with Oracle. Sometimes, meeting the end of life for RHEL versions is tough, and we have had to buy extended support for RHE because some applications reached the end of life within a year. I appreciate the extended support option, though I prefer not to use it.

RHEL's pricing and licensing are quite expensive. For a big company, paying these fees might be manageable, but as a government organization, spending tax money on such expensive solutions is challenging, even though we do have the funds.

I see benefits in using RHEL because it offers stability and long-term support. Although we use both RHEL and Ubuntu, I have noticed that updates in Ubuntu can change things unexpectedly within a main release, which I don't like. That is why I focus on RHEL for its consistent and reliable updates.

RHEL's built-in security features are very good for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance. We apply security guidelines in Linux using RHEL, which provides all the necessary baselines. We can choose and apply what we need directly to our RHEL systems.

I would say that open-source cloud-based operating systems like Debian are stable and have been around for a long time. There is a whole community supporting it, making it a strong alternative to RHEL with fewer licensing costs.

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

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for virtualization and multi-cloud environment integrations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has improved our organization by at least 10% in the business unit and multiplies across the other business units as well.

The most valuable features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux are the mobile applications and getting real-time notifications. With other solutions, each cloud infrastructure is hard to manage with different notifications coming on, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is able to go on-premises and cloud.

A lot of improvement is required to get security compliance, especially with the privacy of the data, managing it, and storing it.

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

The solution's initial setup involves initial hiccups going back and forth to the requirements and the architecture, but so far, so good.

We have seen a return on investment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux regarding timely customer delivery, leading with innovation, and going into cloud solutions. It has progressed, and the maturity level has improved. So, we are learning as we go along this journey.

A lot of improvement is required to get security compliance, especially with the privacy of the data, managing it, and storing it. I'm sure Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be able to improve in the future.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's effect on our system's uptime or security has been really positive. Especially with the customer's feedback coming out, I would definitely like to continue its usage.

It has enabled us to achieve 50% security standards certification. It doesn't fall into that domain, but the overall security policies do help integrate with it.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a hybrid-cloud environment. It has not yet supported our hybrid cloud strategy. It's still a work in progress, but I'm sure they will be able to do it in the future.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is really helpful, especially in connecting different cross-functional communities.

Our in-house monitoring services team with the network operating center manages our Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems regarding provisioning and patching. It has quite a good integration with Red Hat.

We have tried Red Hat Insights, and it's really helpful for the market competitive intelligence portal we have in-house and how it interacts with external parties.

We have tried Red Hat Enterprise Linux system roles, and it is helpful for on-time delivery.

We have tried the Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console. It has helped us 50%, and it still needs to be reviewed in more detail.

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

Our use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is for production applications. 

We are a Managed Service Provider. Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables us not to be worried about vulnerabilities, security, and patching.

The most valuable features are the subscriptions and upgrades. 

We need to have more flexibility on the developed versions. Not everybody is ready to subscribe to enterprise versions. They would like to test the tool without subscriptions. 

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of its security. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux with AWS. We started our practice with AWS, and most customers use it instead of GCP or Azure. We use the product in a hybrid environment, mostly when shifting the containers or existing workloads from legacy systems. 

Most of the customers use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is the only approved OS. The tool's knowledge base is good but is limited to subscriptions. 

The upgrade migration is straightforward. For the initial projects, we used to execute CLI scripts. We plan to upgrade the system if everything works well in the lower environment. 

I have used the image builder feature. I rate the overall product a nine out of ten. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an operating system for hosting Oracle databases.

Compared to Windows as a server operating system, Red Hat Enterprise Linux seems more secure, and we've had fewer intrusions onto our systems. That one, for us, is the single most important thing. In a few instances where we've had intrusions, we've been able to detect them very quickly and get patches that fix those security holes very quickly, thus preventing further intrusions.

In the cases of clients I've worked for, I've never been involved in a ransomware attack or a significant reportable data loss. That is why we continue using either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Oracle Linux.

The most valuable features are its stability and resilience in that we rarely have to take down the systems completely to patch them.

The operating system configuration and function selection could be improved. Configuring the operating system and selection of options takes a lot of expertise. I'm now going to retire, and I've been doing this for many years. Trying to train people to make those choices is proving to be difficult. However, to get applications to run efficiently in those environments, those selections are absolutely crucial.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux should include simpler storage management.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 20 years.

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

No system is infinitely scalable in a linear manner. As you scale up anything, the fact that you're scaling adds overheads. If I were to compare Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Windows, I would give Windows a seven because you run out of scalability much faster on the Windows side.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's technical support team is not that great.

Negative

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expensive, but it's hard to quantify. Oracle doesn't have a license. You just download Oracle software and use it, but their support is way more expensive. So they're about the same. With these types of operating systems, you need to have some support. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you need to pay a massive upfront licensing fee in order to get support. You don't have to pay a licensing fee for Oracle, but then you pay a massive support fee to get the support.

They're about the same overall. I don't really make that choice for my clients. I ask them to ensure that they do have some support from someplace. If they suffer a breach and need someone to help fix the problem, they should have something up and running when it happens instead of running around trying to arrange it.

Most of my clients have particularly sensitive information. We tend to run on-premises rather than the cloud because of security issues for those highly sensitive databases. We disconnect those databases from the internet so they are ultimately secure. That is something that you cannot do in the cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux doesn't have any particular standout security features, which the other Linux tools don't have. I've also used the Oracle version of Linux, which seems very similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Both seem to be as secure as the other. If I have to give a score in relation to stability, Oracle's version of Linux might be slightly more stable than Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

All the customers I've worked for have been using those operating systems for a long time. For instance, one of our customers has been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since it was first available over 20 years ago. A return from that is difficult. They were using Unix rather than Linux. The applications they ran were ported from those environments, and migrating them to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was relatively painless. We did those migrations back in 1995 to 1997.

We tend to use the environment for running databases. So, we have very few real users directly connecting to the system. The people who connect to the system do so by applications.

We haven't needed any maintenance for a long time. My last company was a large organization, and we had the internal expertise to provide support. Some net contributors have fixed bugs themselves and contributed those bug fixes back into the Linux open-source community. It was a huge organization, and its IT department was as big as some software consultancies.

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

We installed the product at a very large hospital as their underlying operating system for Kubernetes, but it is not OpenShift. We use it for one-off servers and lab machines.

Copious documentation is probably the best feature of the solution. If you have a lot of high-quality documentation in one location, it is easier to search and get exactly what you need. It's more efficient when I get stuck on a problem or need help configuring something. It saves us time searching through Google or looking through GitHub Issues to solve the problems. It is a top-notch solution.

If the solution were easier to use and understand, it would not get disabled as often as it does. The solution should be made more secure. The changes made to CentOS make it hard for somebody to spin up and test it without having a preexisting relationship and license. 

If somebody wants to get something going quickly and is trying to settle on Red Hat, they don't have a free version to go to. Ubuntu and SUSE provide such platforms to the users. It is one Achilles heel in Red Hat at the moment. 

Even if Red Hat would enable a full version trial for people to test it, it would be less than what others are doing. Others are giving it away for free until you actually need support, and then you can choose if you need to buy it. With SUSE you can install it with SUSE Leap. It's pretty much the same thing. When you want support, you must enable support, and it becomes SLES.

There's nothing in Red Hat where I can run along on the free version for as long as I need to, and then when I want support, activate support on the same product. I have to reinstall it if I want Red Hat. Even with CentOS, it still wasn't possible to just activate it for Red Hat and make it become Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That's been something that's long been lacking in the product.

I have been using the solution since 1996 or 1997.

I have no complaints at all about the stability of the product.

As time goes on, the solution gets better. It adopts new features. I would say that it does a pretty good job.

The few times that I've encountered support, it was great. I don't really go through support channels. However, when I reach out and ask a question to the people I know in support, I get answers pretty quickly. I find that they have a good deal of product knowledge.

Positive

When I first started using the product in the 90s, it was just Red Hat. So I used Red Hat, and I used IBM Slack. I've used quite a number of different Linux distributions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been around longer than Ubuntu. I still use other solutions along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Typically, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. If it's virtualization, it is really easy because we have an image already, or we can create one. We can use Kickstart. I used to run a 5000-node HPC cluster in the early 2000s based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We used a combination of SystemImager and Kickstart for it.

It's the default posture of a lot of the third-party vendors that you should just disable and leave them off. With containerization being prevalent everywhere, portability is across the board. Red Hat Enterprise Linux adopted Podman as opposed to Docker. Podman is a good tool, and I like it. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the standard on which many others have based their platforms.

Using SELinux is largely misunderstood. If used properly, it provides a great platform for us. Red Hat is a big corporation, and we have people we can reach out and talk to. The same goes for SUSE. For Ubuntu, I have always gone straight to NVIDIA for support. I personally don't know of any great differentiators between all the products. I know Red Hat. It's been around longer, and I've had a long history that makes me comfortable. 

I wouldn’t recommend one over the other. It would come down to the use case. If someone wants Kubernetes on-prem, I would probably guide them toward OpenShift. I do have customers that don't run OpenShift on-prem. I often find that the customers already have a preference because they already have a license. So it's never really a decision that falls on me.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses firewalls, so configuring a firewall is easy. I have deployed the solution in multiple places. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We are running databases and applications on it. We are also using the Squid proxy server, NGINX, and Apache, so we are running multiple services on the servers.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight and nine. We also use Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat Ansible Tower.

I've mostly worked with the telcos and banking sectors, and they mostly have on-prem setups. We do have a hybrid environment where we have multiple machines running on AWS. I am based in Saudi, where they are using another cloud called Din. They are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Din as well.

Their trainings should be free.

It's more stable than the other operating systems. That's why everyone is using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux platform instead of Windows on the server side.

They regularly send us updates regarding patches and security vulnerabilities. We patch our servers quarterly. Mostly, we do patching every three months. They always send us updates on our official email, so it's quite good.

It would be very good if we can easily migrate from CentOS to Red Hat. We are about to move from CentOS to Red Hat. It would be great if they can give us a free version. Otherwise, we need to purchase licenses, which are quite expensive.

I've been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for five to six years. I have only been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux over these years.

Its stability is quite good. I'd rate it a nine out of ten.

I'd rate it a nine out of ten in terms of scalability. It's being used in the banking center, and they are running their applications and databases on it. 

We have LVM configurations, so according to the application, we can increase the disk size. The environment is quite good for my use.

Their support is quite good, and they're responsive, but they first send us to the platform to check the issues. They don't provide direct support immediately. For a new engineer, it can be quite difficult. It would be good if they put us directly on the call in case of an emergency.

Some of the newer engineers require support in a quick manner. Those of us who have experience of six to seven years don't require the support, but in the beginning, we required support, and their support was quite good.

Positive

The product selection depends on the company. Telco companies have the budget, and they are using licensed products, whereas small companies usually use the free versions of Linux. They go for Oracle Linux, CentOS, etc.

We are using CentOS and Ubuntu on some of the machines. The company wanted to go for a free product, but I told them that for any support in the future, we need a licensed product, and they are now migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

It's best in terms of security features. We configure the templates and then we implement the CIS controls, security features, and complete patching of the server.

In terms of maintenance, Red Hat provides us with the details about the security vulnerabilities, and the engineer needs to implement all the security on the servers.

We did it on our own.

We haven't seen an ROI.

From a management point of view, it's quite good, but everyone is complaining that it's more expensive than the other operating systems.

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

Absolutely rock solid performance, security, stability and reliability, essential features for a business that needs to mission critical applications in a 24 x 7 environment.

Plethora of useful tools and services that just make getting the job done a lot less time consuming.

RedHat Enterprise Linux has been running mission critical systems in my organization now for nearly 8 years, in a 24 x 7 environment.

During this time we have never, ever had any of our servers fail to function as needed.

Red Hat Linux has given us five nines (99.999%) uptime for years.

I have been using Linux in various forms for 10+ years

Mainly just the usual issues one will encounter whilst learning the platform, working out the best way to deploy and configure the servers, other than that though, the actual deployments were very straight-forward.

None, our RHEL servers have been rock solid.

No, we have RHEL servers of varying capacities and workloads, so far it's taken everything we can throw at it.

The technical support subscription is absolutely worth while if you need to use RHEL in production, knowing you can get support if you need it is comforting.

I've lodged a few support tickets over the years and always had prompt, informative responses, I would rate their support as being excellent.

We were using an earlier version of HP UX running on PA-RISC architecture, however we became concerned about the cost of remaining on the PA-RISC HP UX platform and possible future issues at virtualization.

When setting up any Linux environment, make sure you understand how the LVM works. Other than that it was all fairly straight-forward.

It was implemented in-house.

The uptime and reliability are the main ROI's, the product is also very competitively priced RE: Licensing, so many thousands of dollars in licensing costs alone.

The ROI on 10 years of rock solid reliability is almost impossible to calculate.

In Australia, you need to go through a channel partner, shop around and find a good partner that understands the licensing model well.

We evaluated HP UX 11.23, which we had been using before hand. However HP (at the time) had not delivered an x86 port of HP UX at the time when we were going to virtualization, so we needed an alternative to HP UX as we could not move into onto VMWare.

RHEL ticked all the boxes and was support by our technology provider.

Well worth a look if you want supported enterprise Linux.

We use the solution internally for developing our software, including running databases and banking applications. These are the kinds of services we provide to customers, as well as our own internal software products.

The solution has helped enormously in terms of development and infrastructure. It enables us to centralize development and improve productivity significantly by providing a stable platform with documentation and best practices for deploying robust solutions.

One of the most valuable features is the ease of consumption and the extensive community-driven resources. The documentation is extensive, allowing users to get started without difficulty. 

Additionally, the support and stability provided by Red Hat Enterprise Linux contribute significantly to its value.

The solution requires a lot of prerequisites and understanding of the Red Hat ecosystem before one can get started. This complexity could be improved. 

More comprehensive support for OpenShift integrations and a less customized, Red Hat-specific setup process would be beneficial.

We have been using the solution for more than ten years.

The solution has been stable. We partner closely with Red Hat, and the operating system has been reliable for a long time.

I am not directly involved with scaling aspects, so I can't provide specific insights on this.

We have been very happy with customer service and support. Red Hat offers prompt support with a good turnaround time, effectively addressing any issues.

Positive

The pricing is competitive. It is not cheap. That said, it provides value considering what it offers.

I would suggest that anyone starting to develop should consider starting with a community-based version, however, for production workloads, it is important to have the support model from Red Hat as it provides stability and quick issue resolution.