Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

The use case in my very early years was for dedicated servers for doing web applications.

We almost exclusively use Red Hat. The benefits boil down to the support. There is no problem getting support. Whenever we have an issue that we cannot solve, which does not happen often, we have somebody who is there either virtually or physically.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-prem and on the cloud in a hybrid environment. We probably also have edge devices. I am not completely sure about that one. Having it in a hybrid cloud deployment has been no different than having it on-prem. Running it on-prem is just as good as running it on the cloud for us. It simply works.

I appreciate the dashboards that are available online. There has been a lot of feedback on the CVEs. The most recent one that came was probably related to Zutil. Red Hat made an announcement very quickly saying that if you are using only Red Hat features, you do not have to worry about it. It does not run on their operating system. Unless you are custom compiling, it does not work on their system. I greatly appreciate little things like that because they save us a lot of time. If Red Hat is simply saying that it is not a part of their repo, I do not have to look for it.

We use Red Hat Insights but not company-wide. It is one of those things that simply saves you time. I do not want to have myself or anyone on my team go out and check various things. That is the whole purpose of using Red Hat Satellite. The whole purpose of all different dashboards and these websites is to use what you have. Let it report out what you have and not continue to write scripts just to check things.

Their support is valuable. Whenever I had a problem, I could get on a phone call with somebody. I did not have to go to some random forum or send an email and wait forever. I could call somebody.

It does have a workstation option, but you rarely hear anything about it. I would love to see the workstation replace Windows. That is a stretch goal, but it is possible.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since version 4. It has been a while.

It is stable as long as you do not do something stupid.

Red Hat specifically works hard to make it difficult to not be able to scale it into anything. The only thing that I do not see it being capable of, officially at least, are the IoT devices. Technically, it is possible to get it on those devices, but that is not something Red Hat is focusing on right now. From a scalability standpoint, it comes down to what makes a reasonable profit and what is a good return on investment while choosing how to scale and where to scale. Red Hat is doing it right so far.

Prior to a few months ago, the support that we got from a TAM point of view was next to none. Now that I understand the scenario a little bit more, it was not because Red Hat was not doing its job or did not want to do more support. It was because of how the contracts aligned, and more importantly, who in our organization was handling those contracts. We had a recent change in our organization in terms of who is running what and who is handling what. When that change happened, the doors really burst open. Now that we have a different person he is working with, we are getting incredible support from our TAM. He is in communication with us on a very regular basis. While I have been here at Red Hat Summit, we have gone out to have meetings twice. I cannot speak highly enough. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

Positive

My current organization has pretty much always used Red Hat, specifically Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There are all sorts of flavors of Unix in our environment. Almost all of them are there because they are managed network devices.

We wanted to stay close to Red Hat Enterprise Linux simply because of the mentality of the business. We have got some people who have been around for 20 years. Things such as switching from YUM update to APT update are easy. People can usually change from one to another pretty quickly, but some of the other commands that you are used to running in Red Hat Enterprise Linux are slightly different for different versions of Unix. It did not make sense.

I have used a lot of different variants through the years. I could be running Raspberry Pi, or I could be using Ubuntu to do a job but not for the production environment. I do not waste my time anymore. I know what works and where support is.

Our setup is a bit of a hybrid. We are streamlining a lot of things and trying to redesign how we are doing things. In terms of the cloud, we are 100% TerraForm. We are building out infrastructure as a code and TerraForm pipelines. On-prem, we have a Jenkins job that runs some TerraForm, which then runs some Ansible and then some Puppet. There is some cleaning up needed there.

Currently, we use all three major cloud providers: Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Each has its purpose.

The initial experience of deploying it at the current company was terrible, but it was not a Red Hat issue. It was an internalized issue that took a little bit of time to work out. After that, it was not a problem.

We implement it on our own.

I have not run into a single person who knows about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is not being helpful. You can get talking with somebody at Red Hat Summit about what you are doing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and they will be like, "I did that a couple of days ago. Did you run into this problem too?" There is a community. I am sure there are communities for other variants, but my return on investment is simply community and support. I cannot speak highly enough of these two.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would say, "Good Luck!" We looked at a lot of different options to potentially leave Red Hat simply because of the cost. We tried out CentOS. We tried out Rocky. There were even talks about trying out Ubuntu, but there was the hassle of changing all of our mentality and code to work with different systems. It just did not make sense. CentOS worked almost side by side with Red Hat, but certain things that we have specialized with Red Hat were not working on CentOS for some reason.

We chose not to use CentOS because we had a misunderstanding of what AppStream was in terms of end-of-life for CentOS. Rocky was ruled out pretty quickly simply because of a lack of understanding in terms of:

• Where does Rocky come from?
• How reliable is it?
• Where is the support?
  

Red Hat's support model trumps a lot of those other ideas. I tell people that even if they are working in a home lab environment, get a developer license and get a developer account with Red Hat. Use Red Hat because more and more businesses I work with simply use Red Hat. It is great to have Fedora on your laptop as a workstation. It is great to have CentOS as a workstation. That is because those are still a part of Red Hat. You can transition and use Red Hat for a company. I have not been a fan of Ubuntu and some of the other variants because of how easy it is for people to make changes to operating systems that are not fully backed or tested. In my opinion, you do not want to put production on it.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not enabled us to centralize development. We are moving towards centralized development, but there are still so many different teams, so centralized development is not yet there.

We are partially using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. Within the next year, I hope to bring OpenShift in and replace AKS. I do not have a use case for the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Based on what I have seen here at Red Hat Summit, I have a lot of ideas spinning around in my head to make it happen, but I do not yet have anything around containerization.

Red Hat Insights provides vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance, but we are currently not using that side of it. It helps in my limited sandbox environment, but of course, my sandbox is built up and torn down like crazy. It is valuable, but we do not have a great use case yet.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten. I have been working with Unix systems for a while now. The first Unix system I touched was in 1992. There were so many variants that were striving to become well-known. You would hear all of these weird names. There were all of these weird animals and all of these different logos through the years. Even before 1992, there were a lot. As things progressed, you quickly saw different ones die out. I do not remember when I truly got onboarded with Red Hat. I know I started with version 4. It is one of those companies when you are looking for a name that sticks around and about which you do not have to question if they are going to be around for a while. You do not have to question that with Red Hat. You do not have to question that with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, whereas a lot of other variants do not even exist anymore, or they exist, but they have not been maintained longer than some people have been alive.

We use the solution primarily for simulation and CAD solutions. It serves as the main use for our operating systems.

The openness of the operating system makes auditing a lot easier, plus the tools for auditing make that a lot easier to maintain. 

Automation makes compliance a lot easier. 

The knowledge gained from using the system completely makes troubleshooting easier and increases the knowledge pool in the company.

The extendibility of the solution and its openness, along with its integration with all of our other open-source projects, are highly valuable. 

We appreciate that it is one of the few enterprise-enabled Linux operating systems we can use. 

It is very extensible, which aids as our needs change.

We have encountered compatibility issues with certain hypervisors, mainly with Red Hat Enterprise Linux six hosts on the newer versions of FoxMox.

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

The solution has performed really well for our business-critical applications and is very stable. I have no issues.

The solution is very extensible, adapting perfectly as our needs change.

Customer support is very helpful and insightful. I would rate it very well, approximately an eight on a scale of one to ten.

Positive

The biggest return on investment is the knowledge gained by using the system. The access we have to the operating system increases user involvement and facilitates troubleshooting, thus expanding the company's knowledge pool.

The pricing and licensing are reasonable.

For non-business critical applications, a third-party Linux OS may suffice, however, for something running 24/7, it is advisable to go for stability and enterprise support.

The primary software utilized across our business units is S4HANA, which runs on our SAP server hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Consequently, most Red Hat systems in our environment support SAP-related services. We operate approximately 105 Red Hat Enterprise servers dedicated to running these SAP services.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux was implemented due to its robust infrastructure, which allows us to efficiently manage our enterprise servers on a large scale using tools like Red Hat Satellite, Insight, and Ansible. This centralized management simplifies the orchestration and control of our extensive RHEL environment. Red Hat Identity Manager also ensures secure authentication and authorization for our remote systems. Beyond infrastructure, Red Hat's robust support is invaluable, providing timely solutions to complex issues. The operating system's strong security posture, including rapid patch deployment for vulnerabilities, further solidifies our decision to implement RHEL.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux simplifies risk reduction by integrating Red Hat Insights. This provides a comprehensive security posture assessment of our Red Hat systems, offering easy-to-understand best practice recommendations and applicable actionable remediation steps.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is detailed and contains numerous articles that can help resolve our issues.

Red Hat Satellite simplifies our patch process by helping us meet audit and compliance needs. We've set up a lifecycle environment within Satellite to test patches on development and quality systems before deploying them to the operating system. This allows us to roll out patches based on the environment, ensuring thorough testing before reaching production. Additionally, we leverage Ansible automation to streamline provisioning and manage patches effectively. While automation is ongoing, we have successfully implemented Ansible and Red Hat Satellite for provisioning, and we continue to identify areas for further automation within our environment.

Red Hat Insights provides best practice recommendations based on regular system assessments. Like other security tools like Microsoft Azure Defender, it can access a system to offer security improvement suggestions. I have a Red Hat Insights certification and find the tool valuable. It generates actionable recommendations that can be easily implemented through automated processes like FastScript, making it an efficient way to leverage data insights for enhanced system security.

Since implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we have experienced high performance, improved security, excellent support service, and easier system management.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enhanced our security posture through timely security patch releases and best practice recommendations, which collectively have increased the protection of our data systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux allows me to manage all my Cloud and on-premise systems from one console.

The most valuable aspect of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is its ease of management. A robust suite of tools, including the user-friendly GUI and the powerful Red Hat Cockpit web portal, simplifies system administration. Cockpit provides a centralized platform for managing hosts, while Red Hat Satellite or automation servers excel at overseeing large fleets of radar systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux training and certification opportunities for engineers and administrators could be improved. While I have benefited from free training offered by other companies like Microsoft, I have not had similar opportunities with Red Hat. Despite holding a Red Hat certification, I incurred significant costs to achieve it. The training required for these certifications is expensive, and it would be advantageous if Red Hat provided more affordable training courses.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for seven months.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is highly stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scalable.

The support is good.

Positive

I have used Ubuntu Linux, Windows Server, and other solutions. Compared to these alternatives, Red Hat Enterprise Linux stands out as superior in terms of ease of management, security, and support.

The initial deployment is straightforward. Deploying it manually takes about fifteen to twenty minutes from start to finish using it manually.

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

We have 15,000 users all across Africa that use our systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux requires periodic maintenance to apply security patches and updates.

I recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux and conducting a proof of concept to ensure it aligns with our requirements.

We are mostly using it for application servers, infrastructure servers, and database servers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux lends itself to a lot of automation. We are able to manage many more servers with less staff and by using other Red Hat products such as Ansible. Those are the things that I like.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. Their Podman product has made it easier. It comes with a lot of security. It is a drop-in product or replacement for Docker. I have used Docker before and switching to Podman was very easy. I just saw the demo for the Podman desktop, and I am looking forward to using that. It will hopefully help me streamline container usage and container deployment in Kubernetes or OpenShift.

It inherently has a lot of functions built in for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance. For example, it has SELinux, certain firewalls, logging, and all those things. It has all the built-in features required to meet the needs. We can plug in other third-party tools to have it gather information, or we can send logs to centralized locations to track activity and do audits and things like that.

I use Red Hat Insights for different things. I do not use it much to look at security risks. I know that it has those features, but I use a different tool like a Satellite server to take care of patching and things like that. Red Hat Insights provides us with vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance, but it has not affected our uptime much. It is good to see that information. I can see those vulnerabilities, and I can see action steps or remediation steps that I can take. All my servers are patched on a cycle, so as the cycle goes through, each server gets patched based on its own cycle. It does not really affect the uptime.

I like the stability that comes with Red Hat. That has always been the feature that I like. They do not always have the newest features, but they prioritize stability, which is important in the production environment.

Red Hat should keep doing what they have always done. They should continue to be a leader in the open-source space. They should keep innovating and keep creating great products. They can allow more access to their training and their products' testing. There are ways to do it now. You might have to get a certain type of account to test their products. It might be easier if you can just download the product and test it out.

In a production environment, I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for about five years. I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones such as Fedora and CentOS for about 15 years or maybe longer.

It is absolutely stable. It is 100% stable.

It is good. It scales well. With the tools that Red Hat provides, it does not matter if you have 10 servers, 100 servers, or 1,000 servers. They make it simpler with Ansible. Ansible is your friend.

They are top-tier. Support is probably their number one selling point. As long as you give the Red Hat engineers what they need, they are very good at providing new solutions. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I have used Red Hat clones in other positions. I might as well just say it is Red Hat because it is a clone, so I have been using Red Hat all along if we look at different products.

I have worked with CentOS, Rocky Linux, etc. The main difference is that Red Hat's support is top-tier. There is also stability. With the ecosystem that they have built, there are a lot of tools to help me manage. They have Ansible and other great tools to help manage the product. You cannot say the same about Windows. They might have a different way of doing things.

We have deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premises. We have a hybrid cloud environment, but we run other types of servers there. They are mostly Windows, and they are run on Azure cloud. We do not run Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a hybrid cloud environment, but there is always an opportunity to do that in the future.

The Red Hat servers that we have are on-prem. We use VMware and the tools that they provide to deploy Red Hat.

Its initial deployment was done a long time ago. It is a straightforward process to install it as long as you are not trying to do anything complicated.

We do not have a deployment strategy. We install it based on the requirements. If it is a web server or database server, there are different things that you need to do, but it is pretty straightforward. It is a good process.

We took help for deploying Red Hat and purchasing the license and maybe the hardware. We probably used CDW and Advizex. They are probably based in Pittsburgh.

Time savings is the biggest return on investment. I can do more in less or a shorter amount of time. The time savings depend on what you are working on, but you can potentially have about 75% time savings.

I have very little experience with pricing and getting quotes. The whole VMware thing happened, and everybody is looking at different alternatives. At this point, any competitor is probably a good choice based on the cost.

Everyone should evaluate what their needs are, test out different products, and pick the product that is best for their needs. I know that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a very good solid product. One thing I would say is that their support is top-tier, so from that aspect, I would recommend Red Hat.

At this time, I am trying to develop a platform that facilitates developer workflows. We may adopt more of a GitHub mindset and use Red Hat tools, such as OpenShift and Ansible.

We are currently not using containers as much as we would like to. We are working on setting standards. That is going to come down the road. Our workloads right now are mostly virtual machines and monolithic applications built on VMs. We will use them more. We will make more microservices and use pods to contain the applications. We will use more Red Hat tools.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten. There are many things to take into account. From a production perspective, it is a ten out of ten. From the innovation and latest features perspective, it is probably a seven. That is not necessarily a bad thing because that is their unique point. They prioritize stability, but if you want something with your features, you can use Fedora.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's role-based security model enables us to provide discretionary access levels to users based on their roles and their responsibilities. We can also assign access based on service level to maintain service-level accounts for any purpose. If we need to back up a Red Hat Enterprise Linux box, we can assign a role to access that box only on the backup level. 

Red Hat Insights allows us to find vulnerabilities and conduct assessments from our central portal. It gives us insight into the compliance levels of different boxes and their licenses. Red Hat Insights helps us be proactive by giving us the details of recurring issues and vulnerabilities or zero-day threats. It automatically shows us what needs to be prioritized. It improves operations to have a single pane of glass for all your inventories and business. You can also implement automation and remedy most things from the cloud console. This is very helpful. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us achieve security standards certification. Most of our customers require compliance with regulations and internal security policy also. We have to be compliant with the profile for each standard based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux profiles or OSCAP integration. Satellite helps us remedy and manage compliance issues in daily operations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the most reliable Linux flavor in terms of enterprise governance. I prefer it for its code stability, support, and integration. The lifecycle management features help us maintain compliance and keep the components updated.

The built-in security features simplify risk reduction. For example, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has built-in OSCAP profiles that we can select during implementation based on our industry and compliance needs. Using the OSCAP profile, we can minimize the effort needed to keep the software up to date. We also like the Red Hat Co-Pilot, which allows you to configure most things from the GUI.

We also have OpenShift, which enables elaborate, portable, and reliable ccontainerization. We use the System Roles feature when we have to disable root users and assign the system roles on the application level because some applications do not require root-level access or real group access. The System Role feature allows us to impose level controls and segmentation between the users. We can also automate security configurations to maintain consistency across systems over time.

I would like to use OSCAP profiles without the dependency on Red Hat Insights. If you install the OSCAP profiles from Red Hat Insights, I'm not sure if it is currently available in the cloud console. Most of the time, we manage compliance from Red Hat Satellite, but this feature could also be built into the console. Maybe it's not an issue price-wise most of the time, but it would be easier if we could use the same console and test-level capabilities.

I also want the co-pilot to provide more granular control and more features in the GUI, so we can have one configuration from the GUI itself. It would be helpful to have a feature similar to the one in Windows where we can manage all the net flows from one console in a single pane of glass and install it on-premises like an admin center. It would be great if Red Hat had some kind of admin center to manage all the Red Hat Enterprise Linux boxes without using an additional product like Satellite or something, we could use the co-pilot on all the systems to monitor the dashboard.

We started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 in 2015. Now, we are on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, so it has been around eight or nine years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a robust product. 

The scalability depends on the computing capacity and architecture. It varies based on whether we are replicating boxes or putting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux images into containers. The tool we use for orchestration is also a factor. 

I rate Red Hat support 10 out 10. We are mostly dealing with Level 1 or Level 2 support, and we always get a prompt response. Remote support is also available, which is nice. 

Positive

We used some open-source Linux flavors that are now obsolete and CentOS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides excellent support for migrating from CentOS to Red Hat Enterprise Linux at any level, so kudos to Red Hat for that. There is a great tool that enables us to migrate an existing application without any changes, so we can convert CentOS boxes.

There are one or two commercial Linux flavors that can compete with Red Hat, but their based on different architectures. Red Hat has a large portfolio, including OpenShift and SQL automation, offering deep integration between these tools. I don't think there is a competing product that offers a comparable product portfolio because Red Hat is under the umbrella of IBM now and also provides a multi-cloud solution. 

The initial deployment is straightforward. There's no problem. However, it also depends on what we want to achieve. Some of the options add a little complexity. It isn't very complicated, but it requires a different method. Overall, the general installation and configuration are effortless, and we don't have any issues. The initial installation can be done in 15-30 minutes, depending on the computing and storage capacity. 

We have one administrator experienced in Red Hat Enterprise Linux and enterprise Linux for maintence. We prefer a certified person who can understand the data complexities and advanced configuration, but a technician doesn't need to be a specialist to conduct the installation. 

The pricing depends upon the customer's bill of materials and what the customers are planning. Sometimes, a reseller and vendor partners provide a better price. I recommended buying the Red Hat Virtual Data Center instead of buying the Red Hat Enterprise Linux standalone licenses if anyone just wants to run a workload in the cloud environment. Virtual Data Center is the most cost-efficient.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux license has a one-time cost, but there is an ongoing subscription for support with various levels. The license is perpetual, but we pay annually for support. Red Hat's support license is robust. You get three levels of professional support plus community support. Our banking, finance, and telecom clients rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux entirely for their production workloads, so they need to minimize downtime. There is no comparison between professional and open source. We can provide support for some of our clients and set up redundancy, so that's something we can consider when we're looking at licensing or support costs. 

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 out of 10. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an affordable product and a great value. It is constantly evolving and adding capabilities. We can orchestrate a multi-cloud environment for Nutanix under Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's an excellent product for virtualization.  

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for running applications and databases on them.

It has a smaller footprint, so it uses less storage. The product is optimized for resource utilization. Patching is very streamlined for the operating system compared to Windows. We prefer using Red Hat Enterprise Linux over Windows whenever we can. Patching is much easier, and it seems more mature. When we apply a patch, we're less likely to have problems after. It's more stable.

All resources should be available on the website.

I have been using the solution for about three years.

I rate the support a nine or nine and a half out of ten. I am not rating support a ten out of ten because if we were able to receive all of the resources that we could from the website, then we wouldn't need to reach out and contact support. It's a learning curve.

Positive

Previously, we used CentOS. We have also used Oracle Linux, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux's kernel. Now, we're strictly trying to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it provides great support.

The products are pretty similar. A lot of the implementations, commands, and updates are very similar. Overall, we've had a more positive experience using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have a basic build routine when building new servers, updating, and installing add-ons. When we run those scripts, it seems like it's so much more streamlined with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It could be because we're converting everything to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We're exploring more automation features. Three years is still relatively new for an operating system for our department. As we explore more automation-rich features and tools and subsets of tools, we'll be able to utilize the solution better. Red Hat Enterprise Linux may be very good at it, but our knowledge and experience are still growing. We need to take a deeper dive into implementing automation.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux with Microsoft Azure. We did not have concerns about using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud because we had spoken to other customers of Azure that had been running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We can install Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our own, or we can use the custom-built Red Hat Enterprise Linux images available through Azure. It makes the deployment of a server much quicker and more efficient.

We have been migrating some workloads and applications from on-premise to Azure. However, we do not constantly move workloads back and forth between Azure. It's more of a one-way migration. We're trying to be less on-premise and more in the cloud. There's definitely a learning curve for the migration. There were some hiccups with learning how to do the migrations. We've done a handful of migrations so far, and each time, we learn from our previous experiences and mistakes. We use our lessons learned and have a better experience each time that we do a migration. It's getting smoother each time.

The knowledge base offered by the product is really good. There are a lot of resources available on the website. We have a direct contact for support, which we utilize on a regular basis. We have enterprise licenses, so we pay for support. We get support whenever we need it. I have been involved in Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades. It's pretty straightforward. We just convert from different Linux operating systems to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. My technical team has used Red Hat Insights, Image Builder, and Convert2RHEL.

We keep pretty close to the most current versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There are many different versions of the product. Version 9 is the most current. We're trying to stay up with at least one or two versions close to the most current version to stay updated. We don't want to get to a version that would be at the end of its life.

The solution has helped us streamline and optimize our infrastructure for any applications or databases we run on a Linux operating system. They help us save on our physical resources because they're less demanding. Therefore, we don't have to spend as much money on a server that has a lot of CPU and a lot of memory. We can fit many more VMs on a single physical virtualization host because it's optimized. The support is great, and we can find quite a bit of information either directly through the Red Hat website or through the Red Hat community. We're able to do research on our own and find most of the information that we need. If we can't, support will assist us.

Overall, I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

We have a lot of Oracle databases, Tomcat, and Java microservices running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

A lot of our applications are like Java microservices. Deploying them on a Unix platform is so much easier. It's open-sourced and provides a lot of compatibility. It makes it easier for us to roll out applications. It is compatible with most Java microservices applications.

We like that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a vendor-supported product. When we have problems, we just call Red Hat Enterprise Linux for support. The product employs a lot of automation tools to manage its OS. We love using Red Hat Satellite. We have close to 5000 servers. Managing individual servers would be a nightmare.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite help us automate our repetitive tasks. Every flavor of Linux distribution has its own specialties. The product offers a lot of integration within the Red Hat products suite. We use Red Hat products mostly, so it works for us.

The vendor keeps rolling out many packets, which complicates our job. We keep patching our servers. CVEs come out all the time. However, having a solid and secure OS will make our life much easier.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2004.

I never had any problem with support. I didn't have any issues that I did not get a resolution for. Sometimes, it takes a little bit of time, but eventually, it gets resolved.

Positive

I was using AIX, which is also an IBM product. IBM bought Red Hat Enterprise Linux. AIX was more expensive and required IBM System p. Moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was much easier because it is a lot more compatible with the regular hardware like HP and Dell that we buy on the market.

I have seen an improvement in our deployment. When we have applications running on Windows, it takes longer to get them set up and provisioned, and the security is different compared to Red Hat.

The pricing could be better. The tool is getting expensive. Before, we could license only the hypervisor where Red Hat Enterprise Linux is running. Now, if a customer has a 12-node hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux forces customers to license all 12, even though they use only six.

We evaluated SUSE. At that time, SUSE did not have good support. We needed good support worldwide.

We use AWS and Microsoft Azure as our cloud providers. We don't use the off-the-shelf product that we get from the cloud. We build around it because we have a standard template. When we deploy our solution in the cloud, all the security features we need are already within the OS, as opposed to using the cloud OS and applying all the changes we need. It's easier to get our template to the cloud and use it.

The licensing for the cloud environment is totally different than the on-premise one. We use the Virtual Datacenter license on-premises. I don't see any difference because Red Hat Enterprise Linux still supports it, whether on-premise or on the cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux knows its product. Whenever I have an issue, an engineer gets assigned to me. I can always escalate if needed. We're not using every host that we license. We ensure that we can fail over smoothly on every single hypervisor. It's fair to license them. We're not using it, but we're still paying for it. I do not like it, but it is a business cost.

We migrate workloads to the cloud. I never upgrade an OS. I usually replace the old OS with a new OS and migrate the application. I use the OS versions 7, 8, and 9. The migration is pretty straightforward. AWS and Azure have a tool that we can use to integrate with our environment. It's a lift and shift. We grab the VM from our on-premise hypervisors and move it to the cloud.

We use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform mostly for patching and upgrading to the next revisions. We don't upgrade from one OS to another. We build on a new OS and get all the applications running there. Once the application is running, we move all the workload from the old OS to the new OS. There's no impact on the existing system.

I don't do the day-to-day patching because we have a managed service. However, it does create interruption. When we do a patch, we have to reboot, especially when there's a kernel update. It causes an outage. I have used Red Hat Insights. It gives us insight into what's happening on every single Red Hat VM that we have. It tells us if it's behind or has some performance bottlenecks. It gives us visibility on the health of the whole OS.

People who are looking into the product must get a good account manager. We must have a good account manager who we can always contact and who gives us all the updates that we need. They keep us in the loop on what is happening in the Red Hat world. We are satisfied with the product.

Overall, I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

We have Ansible deployed on our Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. We use it to manage the security of our fleet of Ubuntu virtual machines.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is way ahead of Ubuntu in terms of security and compliance. It is mainly the ecosystem of data science tools that our developers want that pushes us in that direction. As a security engineer, I have a lot more peace at night knowing that my Red Hat servers are doing a good job keeping our Ansible infrastructure safe because that has fingers into everything we do. It is pretty critical.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not affected our system's uptime in any particularly noticeable way.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not enabled us to achieve security standards certification because we do not have any yet. We will have them hopefully in the future.

There are some nice integrations with scanning for vulnerabilities. That is the feature I have enjoyed the most because I am a security person, and that is my bread and butter.

Ansible has certainly been a game-changer. It is a lot easier to keep a whole bunch of virtual machines consistent with each other and make a change consistently across all of them. We use them for data science activities. Our data scientists are constantly trying out new packages and downloading new tools. We have to enable them to have root access on their machines but also need to ensure that they are not doing anything stupid at the same time. There are competitors to Ansible, but we are a big Python shop, so it is a very comfortable environment for us.

The only issue we have had with it is around the SELinux configuration because the way Ansible installs, it sticks the platform passwords in a flat file. We want that locked down more strongly than what is there currently with SELinux. 

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

I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

Positive

Primarily, we have used Ubuntu. We have had some of our use cases on CentOS, and then, of course, our workstations are all Windows, but I wish they were not.

We chose Ansible, and that chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for us.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud. We have Azure because it is the corporate standard. We do not have any concerns about using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud. Obviously, everything in the cloud is more exposed than everything on-prem, but it has got good, sensible, and secure defaults built in, so there are no concerns there.

In terms of Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades, when we upgraded Ansible this fall, that pushed us from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. It should be a little easier from now on. Now that we have made the big jump from the older Ansible to AAP, we will probably be upgrading the systems on a quarterly basis.

We probably have not yet seen an ROI. We purchased it a couple of years ago, but we have not had the time to put it to as much use as we wanted to put it to. The cost is low, so it would not take very long to reach a return on investment.

We have not made use of the Committed Spend.

For its use case, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.