Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We are an Azure shop that runs middleware applications like Java and JBoss, running on the Azure back end. We have to redeploy everything via ARM templates. Anytime we do an upgrade of the application itself, it's a redeployment. We have custom images that we set up through Azure pipelines. We use Ansible for code changes and server changes.

The solution's stability is great, and patching it with Ansible is very easy.

The solution's licensing sometimes could be a little bit confusing for someone who's not a full-blown system admin and doesn't have a lot of experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It took a while for me to understand the licensing.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s built-in security features for simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance are pretty good. My only exposure is just packet management, but packet management gives me everything that I need.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to achieve security standards certification. We have to stay on top of things because we work with the Ontario District School Board. There's a big emphasis on keeping everything secure, and the solution has helped us to do that.

Right now, our company is migrating to 8.8, and I think we will stay on 8 for a few years. We're doing everything through the images, and we keep everything updated with Ansible. I don't think we have any plans to use any of the automation tools other than Ansible.

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

All of our application services, application databases, and web services run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Everything is on there.  

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is certainly more secure than AIX, which is what we had. It's also better than Solaris. It has improved from that perspective. We can handle the vulnerabilities better. It's more secure.

Other than that, some of the products that we are using, we are migrating out of very costly license items. For example, we're using Fusion because we wanted to migrate, and then we started using Vision Manager. We did a POC a few years ago. We started using PAM because we wanted an engine in our workflow management system from that perspective. 

We are still exploring a lot of items, but it's been a decent journey. It has helped to set up modern technologies.

We use a lot of Red Hat products. We use Red Hat PAM, Red Hat Session Manager, and the operating system. 

We use the operating system the most because all our servers are on it.

The support is good. Red Hat provides use with a degree of training.

The adoption was slightly slow because the knowledge in the market is slightly less available. It's hard to find resources to actually support the product.

Some kind of training that can upskill the resource into this technology could certainly help.

I started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 6 in 2019. We have our own data center.

We used different solutions. We moved from AIX 7.1 to RHEL 6. Then we moved to 7. Now we're going to 8.

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because we wanted to adopt newer technologies and we wanted to secure our systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux was a good available option. 

It's on-prem right now. The deployment was straightforward. 

I manage the infrastructure team so all of these things are under my purview. 

We did hit some hiccups, but then RHEL's emergency support was available, and we were able to resolve it. 

We have an engineering team that analyzes different products. During the analysis phase, we look for all vulnerabilities.

Once it passes all of those things, it becomes available in our internal protocol. We have different names where it becomes available in our source space to get deployed.

Migrations and upgrades have been straightforward. For example, OpenSSL has different versions that are not supported on RHEL 7, which we have right now. There is a version that comes built-in. 

We faced some issues, but we worked it out with Red Hat. They gave us a patch. 

We're moving to RHEL 8 now. We moved to RHEL 7 last year; we're going to RHEL 8 now. Next year, in 2024, we plan to move to RHEL 8.

We saw a return on investment. It is helping the business. 

The pricing is competitive. It's not low, but it is in the market. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is connected to our internal private cloud that is air-gapped.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system on our network management and data management servers. It is our server operating system of choice for any type of hardware that needs to be reliable and stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux solved our need for automation and running containers. It is the most stable open source operating system available. When compared to other OSes, it is reliable and works well. This is important for my line of work, where I need to be able to reliably transfer files across thousands of miles. I need to do this quickly, and I have found that other OS solutions, such as Windows Server and Ubuntu Linux Server, are not as reliable or as quick. I have found myself constantly having to troubleshoot problems with these other OSes, and there is often not a lot of documentation available to help me.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux knowledge base is awesome. Everything is documented, so I could easily find the information I needed to troubleshoot my misconfiguration issue. The knowledge base even provides suggestions for likely causes, which was helpful because most of the time, when something isn't working right on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, it's a configuration issue.

Security is one of the benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is secure from the start, and it does not take long to configure it to meet government security standards. It also performs well during the staging process, and it does not break or cause services to be lost. In contrast, other operating systems often lock accounts, break, and cause services to be lost.

Simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance is straightforward and uncomplicated. There is plenty of documentation to help us, so if we get lost, we can refer to it to find our way.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes it easier for our company to stay agile. We have found that our applications and programs run just fine on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which provides a lot of supportability.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's most valuable feature is that it comes with all the tools we need to set up and maintain an enterprise-grade system. Even if we install the minimal version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we will still have everything we need to get up and running quickly and easily. And if we ever need to restore our system from a backup, Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes it easy to do so, whether we are restoring from a scratch build or a backup that is a few weeks old.

A feature that I would like to see in the image builder is the ability to open the image in live mode and access a command line interface. This would allow me to immediately apply the necessary security settings required by the STIG. By doing so, I can deploy the image with the confidence that vulnerabilities present in the live network cloud service are closed before deployment, rather than applying the settings afterward as suggested in the example by Red Hat.

Ideally, I would prefer to deploy an operating system that already has all the necessary configurations in place. This would involve accessing a command line interface, adjusting configuration files as needed, setting up banners, and establishing user accounts. After making these changes, I would create an image and deploy it. I've noticed that the current image builder is primarily designed for commercial use, but as a DoD user, I have different requirements. Therefore, having an emulator or virtual terminal that allows me to interact with the kernel and make live changes, which can then be saved to create a customized ISO, would be an excellent feature to have. It would be great if Red Hat Enterprise Linux had a similar capability. Interestingly, Ubuntu Linux does offer this functionality with its "Custom Ubuntu Basic ISO Creator" (CUBIC).

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a scalable operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a wide range of options and features, and we are only just beginning to explore its full potential.

The initial setup is straightforward. I installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux using the stick method. I had to create nine different partitions, all of which were encrypted. This is where things got a little complicated. We need to decide whether to create a LUKS partition or partition and build our image on top of a LUKS partition. Initially, I was individually encrypting each partition using the "encrypt" option. However, this is not ideal because we cannot grow or shrink an LVM partition that is on an encrypted partition. Once the partition is created, it is set in stone. So, I needed to figure out how to encrypt just the partition and then create an LVM partition on top of the encrypted partition, such as SDA3. This was a bit of a challenge, and there is not a lot of documentation on how to do this. The documentation that is available is a bit confusing, and I got lost a few times. Once I figured it out, it was not too bad. The entire deployment process takes about 20 minutes.

We have seen a return on investment in all areas with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including productivity. We use it in our daily operations in almost all of our systems. In one form or another, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is running on our systems. If we are not running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, our systems are unstable.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.

For those who are looking at other open source cloud-based operating systems for Linux, I would recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is well-documented and has a large pool of information available. We can also use CentOS content with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The pool of information for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is far greater than some other open-source solutions.

The environment in which we deployed the solution is enterprise-level.

I work in the energy sector, so we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a variety of purposes. These include high-performance computing, running applications like SAP, geospatial applications, and Oracle. We rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a wide range of applications, including those that require running Oracle databases.

It is important to our organization to have a solution that avoids cloud vendor lock-in. We just don't want to be locked into just one side or the other. We want to have the flexibility and availability to explore other options.

One of the main reasons we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux was its reliability and stability. Compared to the Microsoft Windows environment, the Linux environment provided much greater stability. Therefore, we decided to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for all our critical applications at that time, as they required a Linux-only environment.

We use Red Hat Image Builder as well. The golden images created by Image Builder are okay. In our organization, we prefer to create our own images because we need to incorporate our own security measures and harden the images accordingly.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux could do better in live patching. In this day and age, vulnerabilities are constantly emerging, I feel that Red Hat Enterprise Linux has fallen backward in terms of live patching, particularly live kernel patching. There are other products available that can perform this function, and they often follow their direction. 

Currently, my company has a live patch solution where we can patch the kernel without rebooting. This is essential because certain applications cannot tolerate downtime for reboots. However, there is a security concern when the patching process is delayed, as it exposes the system to high vulnerabilities and risks. So, when critical applications go down due to rebooting, it has a significant impact on both the financial and operational aspects. It requires a lot of money and manpower to schedule and execute the reboots, and during that time, the application downtime results in losing money. I believe this is an area that Red Hat Enterprise Linux should focus on to address this challenge.

I have been using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system for around 20 years. We transferred our existing subscriptions to the cloud version. We are actually exploring hybrid solutions and availability options. As we transition to Azure, we are bringing our own subscription.

The scalability is good. We are able to scale efficiently. In our high-performance computing department, they handle a lot of scaling, and it's going well. Red Hat Enterprise Linux scales well.

I'm not particularly fond of the support. For example, when we have a server that's down, we raise a ticket indicating the severity of the issue. Then we receive another email suggesting things we can try to resolve the problem. I miss the days when we could directly speak to someone because sometimes, depending on the maintenance contracts and SLAs, it can take a lot of time without actually making any progress. Whereas speaking with a support representative could significantly reduce the downtime. So, I'm not really crazy about it.

The knowledge base is good. I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

Neutral

One of Red Hat Enterprise Linux's pros is that it has been around the longest. When working in a large corporate environment, reliability is crucial. In case something breaks, you want to have the assurance that there is a reliable support system to address the issues. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides that level of support. 

However, it's important to note that even with a solid distribution like in Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the effectiveness may vary depending on the specific customer or scenario. It's about assessing how well the distribution handles issues when the next customer raises a complaint. So, we need to carefully consider the pros and cons based on our requirements. For certain workloads and development tasks, we might consider freestyle options that don't require paid subscriptions. In my company, we have a development program that greatly supports our decision to go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Personally, I find the deployment process straightforward, but I've been doing it for quite some time. I can't speak for someone who is new to it. However, from my experience, it's relatively straightforward. I've been in this role for a while, so I'm familiar with the process.

Currently, we use Azure AVS, which allows us to migrate existing physical machines to the cloud until we can fully modernize them. It's much easier than it was a couple of years ago, but there is still some work to be done. Overall, it's manageable for us to move workloads between the cloud and on-premises or data center environment using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We have streamlined our deployment process within our guidelines. I can build a server in just three minutes. The time required depends on the type of server we need. If it's a more specialized server, it may take longer. However, it's nothing like the old days when it used to take several days. Especially in the cloud environment, it's quite fast. On-premises is a different story because we need to consider hardware availability, which can take longer. But once we have the hardware, the deployment itself typically takes less than an hour, especially when we leverage tools like Satellite for automation.

We have indeed realized a return on our investment. If we hadn't, we wouldn't still be using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, we are always striving to improve our return on investment. That's why we continually conduct due diligence and explore other operating systems to ensure that we're not blindly sticking with a particular company. We want to find the best solution that can potentially save us more money while delivering an equal or better return on investment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is starting to realize some other companies are gaining some footing in the industry. Red Hat's pricing still needs to get a little bit better. When you look at what you pay for a subscription compared to what you can pay with some of these other companies that do offer a lot of technical backing behind them, it starts turning heads.

Red Hat should focus on making enhancements and providing better support in that arena.

Before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we did evaluate other Linux-based solutions. When we initially chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we had options like Solaris and SGI. However, even recently, we have continued to evaluate other distributions because the Linux landscape is constantly evolving. There are new solutions emerging, so we have to perform our due diligence and assess what they can offer.

For customers looking for alternatives to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, my advice would be to choose something that aligns with your requirements and that you are happy with. Don't just pick something because it's cheap. You gotta look at the long term. Also, know what is needed for your project. For example, if you have issues, can you get those issues resolved in a timely manner? If you run into an issue, you're stuck, and they can't help you out, this means your project will be delayed. You will need to weigh that out.

There are multiple use cases, and I am mostly focused on information security. Before we promote an ACS policy to production, we should be able to test that build and see how that policy behaves for that build. We use Podman to build some test images and get them to our development box. Then we use commands that we scan against those images. That has been one of the major use cases. 

In the future, we'll move our automation program from an on-premises Windows server to a Linux server. Over a period of time, we want to move those applications to the cloud and OpenShift. Currently, we have many legacy applications that are still being run on Windows Server, and we use the title job scheduler for that. Once we mature and gain more confidence, we want to containerize those applications and move them to OpenShift and Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's most valuable features are the Podman and a lot of packages that come inbuilt as part of the regular package. Podman gives you the opportunity to build those images. Since it's a public registry, you cannot pull those images from a docker, and proxy blocks that. If we know how to recreate that scenario, we use Podman to recreate that image.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux should provide more training because many people are not very familiar with Linux's user interface. If it is made very similar to Windows and people can relate to it, they would be more comfortable.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a stable solution.

I have experience interacting with Red Hat support for ACS. The initial level of support is very minimal. They try to collect all the data, then go to developers or technical people, which usually takes time. So we don't get an immediate response. Hence, there is scope for improvement in Red Hat Enterprise Linux's customer support.

Raising a ticket and having somebody look into it takes time. I rate raising a ticket and addressing it a six to seven out of ten. However, we interact with a responsive relationship manager, who escalates and gets issues fixed. I rate this relationship manager an eight out of ten.

Neutral

Since we have the capability to test vulnerable images, we know much in advance what their impact will be. We can test ACS policies against those vulnerable images. That gives us early visibility instead of deploying that application and finding what is happening there. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all associated components gives us that visibility into vulnerable images, and we can set policies based on whatever we see. So in terms of business impact, we avoid many vulnerabilities that get into the production.

We run some applications on the cloud, but they are not business-critical applications. We run all business-critical applications on-premises. We are not dependent on the cloud for business-critical applications. We are not locked with the vendor.

We use Qualys to scan the underlying node. We expect any critical vulnerabilities to be patched as early as possible. We have an enterprise policy wherein any business-critical vulnerabilities seen on business-critical applications or nodes need to be fixed within 30 days. If some running application is exposed to the internet, we want that to be prioritized. If vendors can prioritize a 30-day life cycle for critical vulnerabilities, that would really help many other organizations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the only option we are currently looking at. We don't want to go with Windows. We already have this ecosystem where we use OpenShift, and it's already integrated with ACS. So we would not like to go with any other different OS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux will integrate easily with the entire ecosystem.

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

We have a private banking client who initially started to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for approximately 30 nodes. They found that Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the perfect operating system for implementing Ansible automation and managing their infrastructure efficiently. They also deployed Red Hat Ansible Tower for centralized management. Due to the stringent security and compliance requirements in the banking industry, they chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their preferred operating system to ensure security and governance across their infrastructure.

In terms of clustering, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides robustness and scalability compared to non-Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating systems. Clustering is not as straightforward with non-Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. Red Hat Enterprise Linux's scalability is particularly important for us. We utilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system to achieve scalability in our operations.

Moreover, Red Hat Enterprise Linux's strong security posture and its ability to scale applications on emerging technologies across the hybrid cloud is next-generation. I believe that's what people are seeking in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is built with a strong focus on security, ensuring effective governance and managing security aspects well. We have high hopes that Red Hat will continue to invest more efforts in enhancing security. When it comes to container-based applications and microservices, Red Hat Enterprise Linux plays a crucial role in the hybrid cloud environment.

One challenge we've faced is with databases. Configuring and implementing DBs is much easier in non-Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems, especially in Microsoft. However, as a partner, we faced some challenges with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, particularly when it comes to enterprise applications, especially on the IBM side since it's an IBM core company. There are still several IBM products that need to mature on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Additionally, we require more comprehensive documentation. We face difficulties with the limited availability of documentation for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's a different community compared to the Microsoft market, so we need the right documentation to encourage end users to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We've been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the past seven years. As a business partner, we use the application deployed for our clients, providing consulting services. The clients run their workloads on both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and non-Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. They have two options for cloud providers, hybrid deployments on IBM Cloud and AWS.

The benefit of using a hybrid approach is often discussed when it comes to migrating workloads to the cloud. Due to the OpenShift community, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become the preferred operating system as it provides stability and frequent patches and fixes. Maintaining the total cost of ownership is also more manageable on the cloud.

It's excellent; in fact, it's the most stable. The presence of kernels is the key factor contributing to this stability. When it comes to security, scalability, and robustness, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) excels in all aspects. That's why we rely on this operating system. Personally, during my time as a technical assistant from 2015 to 2016, I installed a couple of IBM applications. I found that everything ran smoothly on Red Hat Enterprise Linux without any failures.

So the stability in Red Hat Enterprise Linux is remarkably good.

The scalability is nice. Red Hat Enterprise Linux doesn't encounter any issues as a supporting core. It can scale effortlessly.

I have personally used Solaris. However, we eventually switched from those operating systems, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been there since version 4.2, a long time ago. I have worked with versions 7 and 9, and I believe the latest one is version 11, although I'm not certain. I have been immersed in technology for the past couple of years.

One of the most important factors is the community. The Red Hat community is different from others, and it is more active and responsive. If you have Red Hat Enterprise Linux and you want to move your production environment from development or testing, it is easy to switch by simply managing the licensing and purchasing the system. You don't need to make extensive changes at the underlying system level. Your system is ready, and you can deploy it in the production environment. It's up and running. If you want to mitigate risks and ensure security in your production environment, you can simply subscribe to RHEL and use it. On the other hand, migrating from other operating systems can be quite cumbersome and challenging. As a client and partner, I always recommend starting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the development and testing environments before moving to production. It makes the journey to production much easier.

Regarding centralization, we have a combination of on-premises and cloud environments where development activities take place. Currently, I don't see a specific use case for centralized development and operations, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is being widely used both in on-premises and cloud setups. As for hybrid deployments, I haven't personally come across many instances of it. There may be a few customers who are utilizing it but not with us thus far.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features in terms of ensuring application and container portability are not an easy task. Although it's not my personal experience, I've observed that in the industry, there is a lot of discussion about moving toward container-based applications. However, only a small number of clients, especially those in highly regulated industries like banking, government, and oil and gas, have actually embraced containerization. They are facing significant challenges when it comes to adopting container-based applications. Many of them still rely on legacy systems running on-premises, such as mainframes.

I have seen an ROI. The most important determinant is the security aspect. Because you rely on the security of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, that's something you are paying for.

When it comes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux pricing, I have a case to share. We recently sold Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS to one of our clients. Before that, I had another client who had concerns about the OS licensing and Red Hat Enterprise Linux's pricing model. The licensing model needs to be more flexible and dynamic because the cost of a single operating system license is relatively high. I'm not suggesting a reduction in cost but rather the introduction of a different model that allows clients to choose scalable options. For example, if a client has licenses for a few operating systems and wants to expand to 50, 100, or even 200, there should be a proposal that offers them flexibility. 

Currently, most clients tend to opt for a limited number of licenses and rely on the community for additional usage, which results in revenue leakage. Red Hat should consider adopting a more aggressive open license policy that encourages higher volume licensing with clients.

When you use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in production, it's worthwhile considering the cost. But even for non-production environments, the client will definitely calculate the expenses since it's a massive implementation for large clients with an operating system. You will open your laptop, and you just need an OS. So my suggestion is for Red Hat to create a business model that also targets the user level and desktop level, where Microsoft is widely used. Considering this eventuality and how many people are switching or still using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we, as a partner, mandate that all our Red Hat team members use Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We don't allow them to use any Microsoft operating system or other operating systems. When engineers join the company and work in the Red Hat pillar, they have to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features, in terms of simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance both maintaining compliance and security, are essential aspects. Compliance requirements vary across different industries, such as banking, with each industry having its specific rules. However, security is a common concern that applies universally. Therefore, we need to address both areas.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides various logs and event triggers that assist in monitoring the operating system's security. Since the operating system sits as the layer between the hardware and the application, it plays a crucial role in safeguarding against security breaches and penetration attacks. A secure application relies on robust application security, followed by a well-protected OS. By ensuring the OS's security, we can establish a strong foundation for the entire ecosystem. If the OS is secure, we can confidently state that the application is at least 80% secure.

Overall, I would rate the product an eight out of ten. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have been using the solution for twelve years.

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

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

The solution is very stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use a combination of Red Hat and Oracle Linux in different parts of the organization. We have a cluster, where RHEL is running. The instances are both virtualized and real, depending on which part of the cluster you're utilizing. They are set up as either RAC or single instance, depending on what we are trying to achieve in terms of performance.

We have PeopleSoft systems that are all deployed on Red Hat. We also use it for deploying simple websites. PostgreSQL is running on the systems, along with a frontend that was created by the developers. We also use it for DNS fallback authentication.

We have quite a few Windows systems, as well, and some of the applications that we used to run on Linux have now been migrated to Windows.

We have a mixed environment, although, in the cluster, our deployment is primarily on-premises. There are some deployments into different cloud providers, depending on the service that we're looking for. However, when we head into the cloud, we tend to go to Product as a Service rather than Infrastructure as a Service or the like. This means that we're less concerned about the underlying operating system and we try to avoid interacting with it as much as possible. So, it is just virtualization in this case.

We rely on RHEL for stability, control, and reliable updates. There may be other Linux variants that work as well or better but we're quite happy with this solution.

We try very hard to ensure that everything is working irrespective of what it's running on, in terms of the operating system and middleware, including what database is running. RHEL helps maintain consistency of application and user experience, regardless of the underlying infrastructure, simply by not being part of the problem.

RHEL enables us to deploy applications across bare metal servers and virtualized environments, and it's an area where everything seems to be working okay. It is reliable and there is nothing that is causing us grief at the moment. The only ones causing us trouble are the applications that we're customizing, although that is nothing at the operating system level.

You can set up the security services quite quickly, which we found very useful in our context because we're a highly public organization and we need to ensure that we've got things patched as quickly as possible.

This is a very robust product that doesn't require a lot of handling. It just works. It doesn't really matter whether we've got Apache components on it or anything else. It'll run.

We have used RHEL's monitoring tools, albeit very rarely. The last time we used this feature, we were trying to track down a problem with one of our LDAP services and we were not getting any useful response back from support for that service. Ultimately, we were able to track the issue to a particular character in a user's surname.

There is nothing to work on in terms of speed and performance.

We started using Red Hat Linux approximately 15 years ago.

Overall, the stability is very good.

The most recent stuff that's been a little bit kinky was in the release of version 8. They were looking to change things around with how the product is built, so it just took us a while before we started using it.

I think we waited until version 8.1 was out and then we were fine. It was a case of us letting that version settle a little bit, as opposed to version 6 and version 7, which we went straight to once released.

Scalability-wise, it suits the needs of our organization and we haven't tried to do anything more than that. When we had multinode, Oracle RAC systems, we had a four-node RAC, each of them had four CPUs and 64 gigs of RAM, and they were all running one database. Performance was not an issue with the database.

This is one of those systems that people can use without knowing it, in a web context. Pretty much all of our research staff and students are using it, at least to a degree, even if it's just for storage management. From their perspective, if you ask them what they're using then it's just a Windows share, but in reality, it's RHEL. There are between 30,000 and 50,000 users in this category, and the majority of them wouldn't even know it was Red Hat.

We've got a fairly straightforward Red Hat implementation but the users do a variety of jobs. Some of the work that we do is implementation integration, so there are no specific users per see. It's just about migrating data and files, depending on what we need. The people that use it in this capacity are academic staff, finance staff, libraries, IT staff, students, and researchers. It is also used by systems engineers, senior systems engineers, the senior security person, my manager, and his boss. There is also a deputy director and the director.

We're probably not going to increase our usage by any level of significance. At the same time, we're probably not going to decrease in any great rush either. We're in a phase where we're looking at what can be put into cloud systems, and we are targeting Product as a Service in that space rather than infrastructure.

Essentially, we're looking to move away from managing operating systems when we put stuff in the cloud, but we still have hundreds of servers, just in one of our locations. The majority of them have no plans to move at this stage, so our installed base is fairly stable.

Primarily, we haven't had to use technical support and I can't recall the last time we actually had to log a call with them. It's a really good situation to be in.

It's an interesting situation because we use Oracle Enterprise Linux primarily. It is really not very different from RHEL because it's just recompiled and they resend it. We use RHEL on one of our clusters, which has about 300 nodes in it and is used in research. In short, we use both Oracle Linux and Red Hat Linux, but the reality is that nothing much is different between the two of them.

We initially implemented Red Hat and we consolidated everything to Oracle Linux because it was cheaper from a support standpoint. That was when Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4 was out. I think that version 5 had only just been released and we switched to Oracle, which is the same thing anyway.

The last time the research cluster was updated, it switched from the IRIX operating system to Red Hat on HP. They weren't necessarily going to implement Red Hat but we had to make sure that everything was licensed correctly, and that's how it came into play. Since it is not using our Oracle license, but it's already bought and paid for, we have not consolidated it. We could consolidate again but it doesn't make a lot of difference in terms of what we do on a day-to-day basis. It runs the same and it operates the same.

We were running version 7 of Red Hat on the cluster and we have versions 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 running in the Oracle Linux space. The applications running on version 4 will only run on that version, and there are only two of those left. We have three instances of version 5, about 30 running on version 6. We are trying to reduce this number and we had more than 60 running on version 6 a few months ago. The fact that this is going down is nice.

Versions 7 and 8 are still supported, so the specific version is not a concern.

Prior to using Linux, we used Digital's TruCluster. However, after Digital was bought by HP, they discontinued the product.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. We put in the satellite server and then ran the config on each of the nodes to tell them where it was. After that, the updates were happening and there wasn't anything else to be done.

We did not use a formal approach for our implementation and deployment. It was probably more haphazard than structured.

We implemented it in-house.

We have four people that support it, although they do not work on it full-time. For example, the person who works on it most consistently also does work in the networking and firewall space, as well as identity management. We have more support staff for Windows within our environment.

The most recent change we made is a flag that had to be set on the kernel for some of the machines. Setting the flag means that you can patch it without having to reboot. This wasn't particularly problematic, although we had to make sure that it was in place because we now have patching occurring on a monthly basis.

In general, there is not much to do in terms of maintenance. The biggest drama has come from organizing upgrades to the application side that sits on top, rather than the operating system itself.

We've had some done ROI analysis over the years and it's always interesting when you read them. When you consider the initial implementation and you couple that with what we did with Oracle, we saved about $500,000 USD on purchasing all of the different parts by going with Red Hat.

This is significant as well because we still had the same capability with the hardware.

We've had similar kinds of examples thrown at us over the years, but primarily that's when comparing HP-UX and other vendor-closed products.

The price is something that can be improved, as they are still being undercut.

We are an educational institution and as such, what we pay is less than the average company. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

Red Hat's single subscription and install repository for all types of systems is something that we're quite interested in because it's simpler and easy to manage hundreds of virtual machines. However, from a pricing standpoint, it's part of the problem because it's what Red Hat utilizes to explain why they cost more.

The Oracle licensing of support for the same Red Hat product is cheaper, and it's cheaper to the level of significance that it makes it worthwhile. We have spoken with the salespeople at Red Hat about it, and they have said that there was nothing they could do.

It's starting to become a question mark over the patching with version eight. We might be changing, but we're unlikely to be changing from Red Hat. It's more a case of who's running our support, be it Oracle or Red Hat. However, we would need to look at the numbers next time we renew, which is not until next year.

Prior to choosing RHEL, we looked at a number of different things. We conducted a fairly large scan of product offerings and our analysis included cost, availability, and support. It took us about three months to go through the process and Red Hat was successful.

The fact that Red Hat is open-source was a consideration, but it wasn't necessarily a winning ticket at the time. We came from a closed source product that we were very happy with but when we were looking at the alternative closed source options, none of them were even close in terms of product offering. Also, they were actually more expensive. So, when looking at the open-source with support opportunity that we were presented with from Red Hat, it was very much a cheaper option that also brought with it a lot of reliability. That is why we chose it.

RHEL provides features that help to speed deployment, although we don't use their tools. We use tools from a third party.

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing RHEL is to make sure that it is going to work for you. Ensure that it supports all of the products that you need it to support once you've actually assessed all of those things. It is a quality product, there's no doubt about that. Once you have made that assessment, I would say, "Great, go for it."

In summary, this is one of the products that works well and does what we need.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.