Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) primarily in the health care industry for AI modeling and edge computing. One use case involves specific monitoring in a room with equipment and hardware.

I'm keen on this product because everything works as expected. It has embedded compliance features. We expect more in version 10. The keynote mentioned embedded OpenSCAP reporting, which is something everyone wants.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a lot of specialized documentation. Typically, people search on the Internet and find solutions by trial and error. However, everything about Red Hat Enterprise Linux is there in the documentation. You only need to follow it correctly. 

The security features have room for improvement, especially for highly regulated industries like health care. That's why it isn't the primary OS in health care. It would be great if they added some features to address the specific challenges health care providers face. 

It isn't hard to patch, but migrating between versions is difficult. We have the the latest version, but the previous version is still working very well. It's hard to leave a working version to upgrade. I would like more AI features, but those will be added to the next version. We are in an AI age, and it's an area where we need to keep pace. 

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since version 3, starting around 2000. Currently, we use version 9.4.

The stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is excellent. I have nothing negative to report in this area.

Scaling Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our needs change has been good. The older versions continue to work well even as we introduce newer solutions.

I rate Red Hat support nine out of 10. They provide competent support and help resolve issues quickly. You don't need to spend a long time searching for a solution. I don't rely on them much, but it has been a big help for my colleagues.

Positive

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for many years, so it is my default choice when selecting an operating system.

I'm a technical guy, so I'm not dealing with the money side of things, but we've seen a return on investment in terms of time saved due to the good documentation and support. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expensive, but I'm not paying anything because it's the company's money. However, it's priced comparably to other enterprise Linux solutions. It costs a lot because you have a large staff working on the concept and improving everything. There is an open-source developer part that is free, so you can test everything before buying it. 

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight out of 10.  I know this is a good product because I've used it for many years, and it continues to improve. The OS is great, so I continue to use it. If I'm working on a new project and given a choice between another solution and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would always choose Red Hat for the community, support, and documentation. 

There's a free developer version. If you are thinking about purchasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, you can try the developer version for free. Practice using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and you will see the difference between the other distributions and Linux. If you want the product to perform at an enterprise level, you need to learn the product. There a plenty of tools and also the Red Hat Academy.

I work for a consulting company, and we have many customers using Red Hat. They use it both on-premises and on the cloud for various applications, including enterprise applications and manufacturing certificates.

We selected Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our workloads due to its excellent support, enhanced stability, reliable update cycle, and strong community.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development and manage a hybrid model with on-premises and cloud deployments. It comes with built-in features that allow for efficient management of applications using tools like Ansible.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects, and one of our recent projects is in the manufacturing sector, specifically on the shop floor, where the latest MES software relies on containers. OpenShift is a valuable solution in this scenario, enabling the use of existing hardware. For instance, if a user already has a VMware hypervisor, they can deploy VMs, utilize them as worker nodes, and build an OpenShift cluster on top of that existing infrastructure.

Red Hat is used both on-premises and in the cloud. By enabling Red Hat Enterprise Linux VMs with Azure Arc, we gain a single management pane for both environments, allowing us to apply policies, check for compliance and vulnerabilities, and more. This unified approach simplifies management and enhances security across our entire infrastructure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has consistently performed well for our business-critical applications. Its stability is evident, as many trading applications rely on this Linux-based operating system globally. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is also widely perceived as more secure than other operating systems.

It offers robust built-in security features.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, particularly with tools like Ansible, has significantly reduced risk in our environment. Ansible enables continuous deployment, streamlined patching, and efficient management of Windows and Linux VMs from a central location.

The portfolio helps reduce our total cost of ownership because our enterprise applications are typically based on its subscription model. This includes application support, vendor support, and other associated costs, making it a cost-effective solution.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a stable operating system, and OpenShift enhances efficiency with a built-in Ingress controller, unlike some managed Kubernetes services.

There is a steep learning curve, especially for users from a Windows or GUI background, because of the command-line interface.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for over ten years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has proven to be a stable operating system suitable for business-critical applications like trading applications worldwide.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux scales beautifully as our needs change.

The customer service is good, but there is room for improvement, especially in terms of continuity when handing over between support personnel.

Neutral

The stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, especially with OpenShift, provides a significant return on investment. The built-in Ingress and efficient management interfaces add to its benefits.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers typically begin AI integration by experimenting with chatbots or virtual assistants to improve productivity. However, a comprehensive business case outlining the use case and value proposition is crucial to secure sponsorship and justify a more extensive implementation.

I recommend considering the support system and available resources when choosing an enterprise Linux distribution. Red Hat, for example, offers a vast partner ecosystem, certified applications, and a subscription-based support model. Its open-source nature, strong community support, and extensive field experience contribute to its popularity. Furthermore, Red Hat's large developer base and significant code contributions demonstrate its wide-reaching impact and robust development.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves a variety of purposes in our organization. Initially, we used it for web hosting and web application support. We've since expanded its use to banking, where it serves as the foundation for our applications, and to containerization projects utilizing Podman.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has brought uniformity and standardization to our workflows, providing excellent support enhanced by using Ansible. This has allowed us to centralize development and standardize all our systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enabled us to centralize development by providing a standard system used across the board. This streamlines development by consolidating our efforts into one system with a single template for deployment and maintenance.

We are successfully using Red Hat Podman for containerization projects without any negative impact.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's support and broad community assistance minimize the effort required to reduce risk, maintain business continuity, and ensure compliance.

Red Hat's container platform enhances organizational agility through the portability of applications and containers. Its centralized approach, which consolidates all resources in a single repository, streamlines operations and reduces management overhead. This robust system simplifies maintenance and ensures consistency across the platform.

My favorite feature is Ansible.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux could improve its communication slightly, but even that is already quite good. They could become the most efficient solution by focusing on improving areas where there is always room for enhancement.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

Regarding scalability, it's enterprise software, so we can make it as big as we want.

Red Hat's customer service and support are excellent. For example, when we experienced instability with IBM DB2, their support team helped us optimize the system for our specific use case and implementation.

Positive

Before I started with our company, they used CentOS. Later, they transitioned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The greatest return on investment from Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the support received.

Companies considering open-source systems are often startups or those seeking platform flexibility. Switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to subscription costs can be a significant financial step.

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

While Rocky Linux is a viable open-source alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for those seeking a cloud-based operating system, a Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription offers numerous advantages beyond the operating system itself and may be a worthwhile investment, depending on budget.

I'm using the Red Hat Platform with Open Stack and an RHEL product for storage. The use case is performance IOPS for Ceph Storage, which depends on a bare-metal RHEL server. 

For my security customer, we get greater than 90 percent uptime. RHEL helped us achieve security certification. It helped my end-user pass their security assessment. RHEL's built-in security features scan the third-party layer in the OpenStack and RHEL platform to assess the SSH and firewall security or patch updates from the RHEL platform and reset OpenStack. Security is the number one priority for my end user. They want to prevent hacker access from the outside. 

RHEL supports the hybrid cloud strategy. The goal of using a bare metal server has been to improve availability and database performance. The OpenStack platform uses network capability to improve database performance.

RHEL improves database and application performance for my end users. The application can collect regional and national data for my end user, a strategic customer in Indonesia.

I am confident in the managed services RHEL provides in terms of the OpenStack, Ceph Storage, and OpenShift container-based products. If there are any problems with the RHEL platform, Open Stack, Ceph Storage, etc., I can raise the issue to RHEL global support. 

For the past twenty or thirty years, Red Hat has reengineered its product from bare-metal on-prem to the cloud environment. Migrating an RHEL system from bare metal to cloud is somewhat difficult. They could add a fast boot. 

We deployed one side of RHEL in 2023, and we'll deploy the other side in 2025.

When I deploy RHEL for the first time, I try to learn about the performance and tune the performance. 

Scalability isn't an issue. Our customers haven't reported any performance problems from scaling up.

I rate Red Hat support eight out of 10. I have used Red Hat support since 2023. They escalate the ticket based on severity, and if they can't resolve the issue within the maintenance window, they will pass me to another engineer. 

Positive

We previously worked with Oracle Linux. My customer has two divisions. The network decision is focused on accounting database performance, while the IT division uses Oracle Linux. On the network side, the customer uses RHEL products like OpenStack, Ceph Storage, and OpenShift. 

My end user wanted to upgrade from RHEL OpenStack 16.1 to the latest 17.1.3 in April 2024. We also upgraded Ceph Storage and OpenShift. Now, my customer wants a testbed before upgrading to the RHEL version in live production. If there are problems, we open a ticket with global support and or two people will join our remote call. We have it deployed in Jakarta and plan to deploy it to Bandung.

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight out of 10. I recommend all the Red Hat products, including OpenShift and Ceph Storage. OpenShift Container is a mature product for RHEL portal customers.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers and Satellite for patch management. We're also using Ansible for automation and hardening. Additionally, I'm doing a migration project from RHEL 7 to RHEL 9. Our environment is a mixture of on-prem and cloud systems. We are a hospital, so we can't keep some information on the cloud for compliance reasons. 

We have a separate team for the hybrid, and I'm part of that team. We've been migrating a few servers from on-prem to the cloud. Everything used to be on a hardware server, but now we use the cloud for the storage network. We share workloads between the cloud and the physical data center. Our Rubrik data backup archives to the cloud with Microsoft Azure. We also partner with Pure Storage, which we use for on-prem storage.

We have physical Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers for the Splunk environment, which is the security solution we use. Hadoop went to the cloud, but it used to be on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have VMware, and our VMs are reserved for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We have been using Red Hat since I was hired. All the app owners want Red Hat. Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports SQL and Oracle databases, which is helpful.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has made significant improvements in terms of storage. You can mount an 18 terabyte file system. It also supports NFS shares and the SIP share for the photos. There have been many features added since RHEL 6. It's more user-friendly and graphical. 

We use Ansible as a go-to for provisioning and hardening the servers. It's so much easier with Ansible because we used scripts in the past. We had to log into each server as such, and it took a long time. With Ansible, we just run one playbook, and it takes care of everything. 

I used Leapp for my upgrade from RHEL 7 to 8. It's an excellent utility tool. When I run the Leapp script, it tells me everything I need to take care of before I run a migration. Red Hat Insight is good because it tells you about the future patches available. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux image builder. Our golden image is a real image. We harden it, and it's our golden server. When we need a new VM, we can just make a snapshot of that. If it's a physical server, then I have to do it manually.

AIX will be out of support in the next few years, so that is a problem because a lot of the clinical apps use AIX. 

I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux since I started working at this hospital six years ago.  

I rate Red Hat support eight out of 10. It's helpful when we face hardware issues, kernel panics, or the server is hanging. We always open a support case with Red Hat, and they're helpful at every level. It used to be in the United States, but now they outsource everything to India, so there is a big time difference. That's the only issue. 

Positive

We have always used Red Hat, but they use CentOS for a few applications. Most are using Red Hat. Another team uses Microsoft Windows 2016. It's a different team. The application team decides which one they prefer, but most clinicians use Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers.

The application owners like Red Hat instead of CentOS or another flavor of Linux because the support is reliable. If something breaks, they can call Red Hat support. It's the enterprise standard Linux.

I do the Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades. It's straightforward because I can just run Leapp to upgrade it

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux nine out of 10. 

I am working with a FinTech company. We have clients in the US, and for these clients, we have applications that are hosted in Amazon Web Services Cloud. We use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux operating system to run these applications.

We have a data center as well. In our organization, we are using a hybrid model. We have the AWS cloud and our data center is using VMware. Some of the workload is in the data center, and some of the workload is running in AWS.

We have various products, and we are trying to move all of the products to the AWS cloud. Our legacy applications are hosted in the data center. We are planning to move this data center to the AWS cloud in 2025. We are using AWS lift and shift technology for that.

The console is user-friendly. The web console provides an interface to manage all your resources.

Overall, I am happy with it, but I believe, security-wise, it could be better.

I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux for almost eight years.

We never faced any major issues.

We are not taking any support from Red Hat. If we face any kind of issue, we just search on the web.

Neutral

I am very comfortable and happy using the Linux operating system. My experience with Windows is very bad.

There are no significant issues; it is very easy to set up. The implementation takes a couple of weeks.

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

Our servers utilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux for production and development environments due to the application's strong performance on this platform. Additionally, some workstations also use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has robust built-in security features that effectively mitigate risk and help maintain compliance.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a comprehensive knowledge base that provides reliable support. When online searches fail to yield the necessary information, their resources consistently deliver the answers needed.

It also offers a positive management experience. Its monthly update patching, scheduled according to the number of users and their security profiles, facilitates efficient system maintenance and allows for the closure of inactive accounts.

I used the Red Hat LEAP feature when upgrading from Red Hat Enterprise Linux seven to eight, which simplified the upgrade process.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux web console is user-friendly. Simply open a new terminal, log in, and enter our desired commands or searches.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has yielded cost savings compared to a Windows environment, offering better stability, ease of use, and maintenance. Unlike Windows servers, it eliminates the need for reboots during updates, enhancing operational efficiency.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has improved our uptime and security. 

I appreciate the simplicity of reporting in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Running a command, tagging the log, and sending it to support is all it takes. The user-friendly interface has consistently improved from version four to eight, particularly in login and display features. Overall, the system is stable, easy to use, and maintain.

Red Hat should improve its support services, specifically the responsiveness and expertise of its India-based team. Response times need to be faster, and support staff should have access to more detailed procedures to address customer cases effectively.

I started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2019. Specifically, I started with Red Hat four and then upgraded to version eight.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very stable. I would rate its stability as nine out of ten.

Scalability is easy because Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports virtual machines. I would rate the scalability a nine out of ten.

Technical support is taking a long time to resolve our issues, and we must monitor the resolution time for each ticket.

Neutral

The initial deployment is easy; follow the instructions and use the automatic setup. This straightforward process takes no more than 15 minutes, even for new users.

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

We have Red Hat Enterprise Linux deployed in one location with 15 users.

We have local maintenance for Red Hat Enterprise Linux by certified admins. 

I recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux for enterprise production environments due to its stability and proven industry track record.

Our primary use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to deploy OpenShift solutions on the cloud.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux with AWS, GCP, Azure, and Oracle Cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers easy migration between cloud platforms, a crucial advantage for businesses. For example, we recently helped one client move from AWS to Azure and another implement a VPN solution using both Oracle and Azure to leverage the strengths of each platform.

It offers a comprehensive knowledge base that can be accessed through the Red Hat portal.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps support our hybrid cloud strategy.

The upgrades and migrations are straightforward and typically performed when introducing new hardware.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's most valuable feature is its seamless integration with Kubernetes, a powerful platform for automating the deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux should enhance its support for commonly used application servers such as JBoss, Tomcat, and Apache.

I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud for five years.

I have a Red Hat account for client support, and their technical support is excellent.

Positive

We have used other Linux solutions, such as Ubuntu, SUSE, and Debian, but the primary difference lies in the level of knowledge and support provided. Red Hat excels with a comprehensive support portal, while SUSE offers less extensive support, and Ubuntu provides no official support options.

The initial setup is complex. I rate the complexity as two out of ten, with one being the most complicated.

Our clients see a return on investment within the first year.

The licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux in Peru is very expensive. On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the most expensive, I would rate the cost an eight.

We leverage Red Hat's Hybrid Committed Spend program to procure and implement Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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