Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system to host various applications developed by our application group. It has our test tools, web servers, and Java applications. We install it based on the requirements of the applications.

It is a good product. All Linux solutions are pretty solid. It carries a different business model than a lot of them, which fits more into our business model. That is where it excels. We do not prefer unsupported ones or buying third-party support.

The most valuable feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is its support. I primarily use the product because it offers a phone number for support when needed. 

It integrates well with our existing systems like SaltStack for patching and provisioning. However, its primary value is in having support when issues arise.

There is room for improvement in terms of pricing and its knowledge base. 

I consider the cost high. The knowledge base is extensive and deep but can be confusing due to outdated or non-applicable information that you have to sift through to find relevant answers.

I have had experience with the basic and extensive use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for about 15 years.

Customer service varies. I would rate their support a five out of ten, as it depends on the person at the other end. Sometimes the support is good, and sometimes it is not so good. It is like any other support organization.

I did not switch from any previous solution. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been in use since before my tenure.

I work in the casino gaming industry. Most of our servers are in Windows. We have about 30 Linux instances. We install it based on the implementation requirements of an application. There is a justification for putting an application into our environment. It goes through a process at our company, and then where we install it or what we install it on is usually up to the requirements of the application.

We have on-premises and cloud-based environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is running in one of those environments. It has adequate features for security in cloud environments. 

We use SaltStack, and we built the patching mechanism ourselves. We are pretty satisfied with it. If we were not satisfied, we would change it.

The upgrades with Leapp used to be painful. It used to not work at all for us. When we went to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, it did work, but it was a fairly painful process. The advantage is we do not have to reinstall the apps on top of the new image of Red Hat. It is an in-place upgrade. The problem is that you can install Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 50 different ways, and in the past, Leapp assumed you did it the default way. They have added some flexibility so that we can work around some of the stuff, but it makes you install it a certain way, which is not necessarily the way we would do it, mainly because of our security standards and performance needs.

We have not experienced a noticeable return on investment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself, as the operating system serves its intended function without bringing additional advantages.

Pricing depends on the model used, costing about $3,000 per virtual host in the virtual environment. It varies depending on whether you get high availability. There are modules that are upsold such as kernel patching, which we do not use due to cost considerations.

In the cloud, we use their licensing. For on-premise, we use the subscription, so we have two different licensing models.

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

In our environment, we primarily use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for managing customer environments and our own. The customer environments are mostly Apache web servers. Some customers have databases, like Postgres, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Others run native Docker on it to manage application dependencies. 

We run containerization projects in the OpenShift environment based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux OS because that's more suitable for containerized workloads. You can do some machines on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but not all of them. Your worker nodes need to be Red Hat CoreOS, but your master nodes can be Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I was more experienced with other Linux distributions and Docker. It's open source, so you can fetch Docker and run it, but they don't have support if you have questions or if something isn't working as expected. Podman is similar to Docker. I don't primarily use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization, but I set something up in Podman on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It isn't used that much. Tinkering and development are the main reasons you would use Podman on a single centralized Red Hat Enterprise Linux machine. If you want to orchestrate on a larger scale, you use OpenShift.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has made significant contributions to our business continuity and compliance efforts. If a critical vulnerability is spotted in the wild, Red Hat fixes it most of the time. It's usually within a day if it's a zero-day vulnerability. Log4J was a bit more difficult because it was not a single package, but it was mostly shipped with other products. It's hard to analyze which application is vulnerable and whatnot. The solution lets us centralize development. We use Ansible to orchestrate the tooling deployment or to fetch a lot of information. 

Red Hat always clearly describes the vulnerability on its security pages as a CVE score. You can fix errors by patching or mitigating them. If the patch hasn't been released, you can mitigate it to prevent the vulnerability from being exploited. Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us guide the data and ensure it is correctly placed. I was monitoring it daily, but it was a bit too frequently. Now, we get vulnerability notifications weekly or monthly about a vulnerability or exploit that's been discovered. I also look on Reddit directly to see if there's a fix or a mitigation we can implement.

Sometimes, when upgrading or migrating systems, there are differences in the repositories of the versions that aren't one-to-one replaceable. For example, there are significant differences in the repositories from version 7 to 8. We needed to upgrade Red Hat Enterprise Linux from version 7 to 8 because it had reached the end of its life. A Postgres database was running on it that used a Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 package, allowing some database or reporting features. When I upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, it was not in the repository. I needed to install it with some workaround. Of course, it was installed with some minor incompatible dependencies. 

I have mixed feelings about the built-in security features. SELinux must be configured correctly for the port and directory, or applications won't run, so we primarily disable it. Sometimes, we enable it and tinker with legacy systems deployed long before I joined the company. However, chances are it will break something if you enable it. 

We have been using RHEL for three years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has performed very well for our business-critical applications, with minimal downtime.

We don't need to dynamically scale our application because of our workloads, as we mostly use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our internal tools. We don't have much demand to scale out.  Containerization lets you quickly scale out your application with some bots if your hardware supports it, and you have enough resources. 

In VMs, we didn't need to dynamically hot plug some service to compensate for the load. It would be vertical scaling by adding more resources. Sometimes, we need to do that for databases that consume a lot of memory, CPU, power, etc.

I rate Red Hat support eight out of 10. It depends on the priority of the requests. We had to launch several P1 requests because something wasn't working in our OpenShift environment, and we were stuck. The support response was quick.

However, we were annoyed that most of the support was based in India. Sometimes, they don't know what the problem is and need to escalate it to an expert in the US or or Germany. It prolongs the ticket resolution, but once it gets to the expert, they fix the problem instantly because they know more. 

Positive

We previously used other Linux distributions with Docker. We prefer Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of its enterprise support capabilities, which open-source distributions like Debian or Ubuntu lack.

I'm unsure what the standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux license costs for one machine. We pay for premium support that guarantees a response in two hours. 

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux eight out of 10. If applications and package installations work correctly, I would give it an 8.5. It's a pleasing OS to work with, especially Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and 9, which are more polished than Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7. I briefly interacted with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, I'm 27, so I know I'm very young, but I know colleagues who worked with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, 5, and 3. 

Other open-source Linux distributions might work if they have high levels of community involvement so the community can identify and fix vulnerabilities quickly. Alma and Rocky Linux are all upstream from Red Hat Enterprise Linux. If you want to go with an open-source distribution, I will point you to Alma and Rocky because they are the one-to-one replacements from CentOS. You don't need a subscription. 

We are a big company with many customers, so we prefer a stable platform with support. You can't open a ticket for open-source distributions like Debian or Ubuntu if you have a problem, ticket. With Red Hat, you can open a ticket if you discover a bug. That's included in your support subscription. You also get regular patches, so we can show our customers we are compliant, etcetera. It's a no-brainer to use an enterprise distribution with support instead of something open source where you don't have a support subscription.

We run web apps. We run databases. We run a high-compute platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux variants.

All of our customers run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We run Red Hat Enterprise Linux for mesh nodes. For anything Linux, if we can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is supported, we put it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Probably 60% to 80% of our infrastructure is Red Hat.

Having a stable Linux platform means I am not spending my time rebuilding Linux systems, constantly patching, and doing things like that. It helps to have an approved and supported platform. I know they have tested everything and when I patch my system, it is not going to blow up. It just does not happen. The other thing is that we have had catastrophic failures, and they have helped us out of these catastrophic failures. The support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux has always been good, and the community around Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been fantastic.

We were also CentOS users, so we have committed to AppStream as well. Being a part of the community has been a huge benefit for us. Community adoption means it is easy for people to find information. It helps new people get on boarded into Linux.

We mostly have an on-prem environment. VMware is a significant chunk. We do have some Red Hat clusters. We do have clustered applications, both physical and virtual, running on the cluster. We do have some cloud. We have our own internal cloud with VMware running behind the scenes. Having a consistent image means things always look the same. It is boring, but it is cookie-cutter. That is what we like. We like everything to come out the same. We have consistency and the ability to patch across our entire environment. We are also a Satellite user, so we are able to patch everything and maintain everything in a single pane of glass. It means I can have fewer admins administering many more machines. If you have a reduction in failure and an improvement in automation, things just work.

We have created what we call creator nodes. We have built a platform on Red Hat with Podman so that they can connect with Visual Studio code and do development or Ansible development. We now have our mainframe people developing automation with Linux with all of the plugins right there. It is a consistent environment for them, and that has been awesome. That has been fantastic. We have a few hiccups with Podman. They are working on the permissions to be able to have multiple people run Podman. They are working on the UID and GID problem that we had earlier. Right now, we are running Docker, but I am planning on moving to Podman once they fix that. We have also automated the build process for those nodes. If we need to scale up, we build a couple more VMs, and we are done.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. We are containerizing applications. We are pulling the Windows container that we have and converting it to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux container. At the Red Hat Summit, the keynote about image RHEL with systemd blew my mind. It is a change from what we have been doing, but it should make a lot of things more reachable for us. It is cool because now my container image looks like my VM image. You cannot make it simpler for people to develop in a container. It looks the same. There is no difference. That is going to drive heavy adoption with us because if there is no difference, people are not going to have that fear of something new. It has 100% impacted our projects in a positive way. We have started to migrate all of our workloads to OpenShift now that we have got it in the door. It makes a lot of sense. I can redeploy. I can patch. I can do all this with code. I do not have to maintain a VM and a container. It makes life simple.

We have seen a drop in TCO because we ended up buying more than building. When you build something, there is the hidden cost of support, training, and the precarious position you get in if you deploy something you do not fully understand. We were there. We had five instances and a bunch of complexity. We reduced that down to one. We were able to simplify our complex nature. That is what Red Hat has allowed us to do. We have been able to roll out and we have been consistent. I have got machines out there that have been running for two or three years with no problems. They just patch them in the background. It just works.

I love systemd. They have made some significant improvements with the firewalld console. I do not use it that much, but I know it makes Linux reachable for people who are not normally Linux admins.

I just love the command line configuration. It makes that easy for me. Another thing is that when you combine that with Ansible, your life is simple. You can do a lot of your jobs without having to touch the system. That is my ideal.

I appreciate everything they have done. The systems are just bulletproof. We do not have problems with it. Support for file system differences and migrations has been solid.

There have been a few things that I have run into. They have significantly improved DNF and YUM, but there can be better communication around what is going on. A lot of it is related to communication. They are building solid products, and quite often, people do not find out about them until two or three years have passed. We still have not discovered everything in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. A lot of it is because we have not had the time, but it would be helpful to have a little bit more communication around it. Maybe that is on us to make sure that we stay updated with the community.

I have been using it since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.5. It has been around 20 years. I love Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability. It is stable. It is fairly bulletproof. There are a lot more things that they are adding to make it better.

I have had no problems scaling up or scaling horizontally. I have had some very large Red Hat Enterprise Linux nodes with 254 gigs of memory and a big chunky Oracle database system. We have had no problems with them. We have not had any problems with running with multiple memory cluster nodes. We have had 100 gigs network, and we had no problems. We had a high-end SAN and a high-end network, and we had no issues.

They have good integrations, and they have not had too many problems with external SAN providers. They have been fairly consistent with keeping up with everybody else and keeping their drivers good.

They are probably one of the better ones in the industry. I can get a real answer, and I do not feel like people are breathing down my neck and saying, "I am going to close your ticket. I have not heard from you in 15 minutes." It has been a very positive experience. They have always helped us out when we have completely gone sideways.

They are very patient with the level of experience that a lot of people have. We have a significant number of junior admins who put in tickets that probably should not have been put in. They have been very patient. Overall, it has been a good and positive experience.

Positive

Before Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I was strictly using Solaris and AIX. I never used Ubuntu. It was just straight, big-frame Unix before I went to Linux. I did not change too many platforms.

We use Ansible to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux machines on VMware. That is 80% to 90% of our workload. For everything else, I have done PXE boot and kickstarts.

We are using a hybrid cloud. Our cloud providers are Azure and AWS. We work with both. The deployment on Azure and AWS was simple. We built Elasticsearch inside of Azure. It was a click-button deployment. We use TerraForm to deploy most of it, and then we have Ansible to do the rest.

I wanted to try to do more infrastructure as code, but it is hard to get traditional admins into that mindset, so it is always a mix. I deploy these servers for them with TerraForm, and then I pretend I never did, and they can do whatever with them. It then goes back into traditional life cycle management. Sometimes they delete them, and sometimes they forget about them. Satellite has helped us keep track of where everything is. It has helped us track our life cycles. It has been helpful for us.

We have used Red Hat consultants multiple times. They helped us set a few things up and clean up our pipelines. We have been very happy with our Red Hat consultants and our last deployment of OpenShift AAP. We loved their consultants. They were fantastic.

The biggest ROI that we have seen by using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is accessibility to information for frontline support people, midline support people, and developers. There is a ton of information, and there is a ton of community support.

For us, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a consistent platform because if we are on a customer's Rocky machine, we already know Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We can deal with that. It is a skill set that is very broad across multiple platforms. That means we can apply what we have learned and what we have been trained in. While working with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team, we have learned best practices, and we can apply those across the board. That partnership has helped us better our internal practices whether it is Red Hat Enterprise Linux or not. That is a positive. Satellite has also been a real positive for us because we can now manage all of our systems from a single pane of glass. That is what my frontline people have been asking for. They wanted one place to patch the systems, and now they can.

Our experience was incredibly positive because we started working with OpenShift before we were fully licensed. They knew we were going in that direction. The same thing happened with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They knew we would buy tons of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so they were a little bit more relaxed. We wanted a thousand licenses, and we could pick those up. We true up. Our license experience has been positive with the exception of having to deal with all of the broken-up accounts, which is as much our fault as anybody's.

My biggest complaint is that we have eight or ten different contracts. It is hard to keep track of what is on what and where we are getting the most value-add out of our benefits.

They are helping us solve that problem. We have reached out to our account executives. They will help us solve that problem. That is a huge step because that has been a problem for 15 years. It will help us consolidate and understand what we are spending across the board instead of seeing what we are spending in chunks.

OpenShift has come close to paying for itself in the first year and a half. That is an easy business case to make if you have the direct ability to show cost savings. We are getting cost savings, and we have the ability to show those cost savings. These are the two major benefits we have seen with AAP and Red Hat Enterprise Linux bits. That has been a positive for us. Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and some of the other things they are starting to do are probably going to enable a lot of our developers to start taking advantage of them. Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI changes the belief that AI is out of reach for a normal developer.

We considered the idea of building this entire platform on Rocky as a free solution. It just was not cost-effective. There are hidden costs of patching and maintaining. They require care and feeding. We wanted cattle, not pets. We had a bunch of pets. Red Hat Enterprise Linux enabled us to get into that cattle methodology and mindset. Our mesh nodes are built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. If my mesh node goes sideways, I do not care. I just delete the VM, redeploy it, and run my playbook. In 15 minutes, I am back up and running again. Why would I troubleshoot it? It takes time. I do not care about troubleshooting. It enables us to rinse and repeat a lot of our processes.

People turn off too many of the tools way too often. We have a lot of room for improvement as an organization to embrace SELinux. We are still working on that. That has a significant amount of value. We want to embrace the GPG sign code in AAP. I do not want anything but approved containers and code running on our platform and our customer's platform. They have enabled us to be incredibly secure, and we are yet to fully take advantage of those offerings. It is a goal, and we are going to get there.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would say that Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based variants are the best in my opinion. If I have a choice, I will always go for CentOS, Fedora, Rocky, or something else that is Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based. If they were not going to go with Red Hat, I would probably tell them to go with CentOS but stay behind a little bit because they do not want to be at the bleeding edge of CentOS. That relationship kind of changed when they took it to AppStream instead of a more supportive platform.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten. They keep doing well, and they keep getting better. As long as they stay on the same path, I do not see us not using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the future. It has been consistent. Why would we change?

I have completed RHCSA and RHCE certifications. In my day-to-day work, I mainly use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for basic installation of Red Hat OS, configuration, MariaDB setup, Apache setup, and cluster management.

Regarding my main use case with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it is an open source OS which allows us to modify the system as per our requirements. It is also secure and user-friendly.

The system is user-friendly because we can use it through both CLI and GUI interfaces, which provides flexibility, and the ability to modify the OS helps me in my daily work.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has positively impacted my organization because we can check for vulnerabilities, and when we have internet access, we can directly install packages. The system provides easy access to internet resources when needed.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has potential for improvement, though currently all features are working well based on my experience. Different versions have increased security measures, which is beneficial.

Regarding needed improvements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), increasing its cloud capabilities would be beneficial. Additionally, it would be helpful if they provided direct RPM package downloads via the Red Hat site without requiring a Red Hat subscription.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for more than five to six years.

I used a different solution before Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) when I was working at SBI, where they had a Galera cluster. Sometimes servers would unexpectedly remove themselves from the cluster, which caused major issues requiring troubleshooting and node verification.

My advice to others considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that compared to Windows and Mac, Red Hat is very comfortable to use.

I currently use both Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and CentOS as tech products.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are extensive, but mostly we utilize it for our clients as a base operating system.Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) solves pain points related to security patching and support.Security requirements for choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the cloud depend heavily on the client's business. For some clients, we don't have any special regulation, but for domains such as oil and gas, there are very strict security requirements that we must meet. In most of the current products, we can find the appropriate and certified product for our clients.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) I appreciate most are centralized account management and SSO. The integration of SSO features, particularly with Azure Active Directory, benefits our organization greatly because it is very easy to grant appropriate access to the operating system.Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risk.

I don't believe there are any additional features that should be included in the next release.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for more than ten years.

What works well for me is that it is pretty stable over the years, and I don't face many challenges with it.I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales well with the growing needs of my organization.

I evaluate customer service and technical support as brilliant.I regard that support as pretty good.

Positive

While I sometimes use other solutions, we are not limited to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and for some cases, we use Canonical products. A long time ago, we used SUSE, but not recently.

I would describe my experience with deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as easy.Managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems from a central management console is a form of centralized management.I am satisfied with that centralized management console.

I have seen ROI with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

When selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), the other solution I considered was Canonical, which is direct competition at the operating system level. However, Red Hat provides a more complete integration between the operating system and platforms.What stood out to me in my evaluation process was how easy it is to integrate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) into the existing IT processes of our clients, which is the main driver for us as cost concerns are not my focus. Maintaining security patching and support over the long term is also crucial for enterprise clients.

I have expanded usage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for myself and my clients.My advice for other organizations considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that if you are talking about long-term solutions, you need to choose a base infrastructure that is supportable for a long time.I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) overall as a nine out of ten.

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the web server application. The application I refer to is the web server application. I use this product in the telecommunication industry. We use it mainly for web applications.

In my opinion, the best features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are security, which is the main feature, and stability, as it's a stable product. The security of RHEL is beneficial because it is pretty good, and we get regular patches if there's an issue. The best security feature of RHEL, in my opinion, is the kernel patches.

RHEL helps me save time since if the OS is stable, I spend less time troubleshooting and can focus on my application. It helps mitigate downtime for sure.

It would be nice if they could bring in more features fast enough. More features for Linux in general would be appreciated. I hope they can draw from the upstream Fedora for more features.

We have not switched from a different solution; we have been using it for many years.

We haven't seen downtime yet, as we don't have a comparison against other operating systems. RHEL helps solve pain points such as less outage and less time spent on stability of the operating system, allowing my team more time to work on our applications.

Scalability is not that significant because, nowadays, OS in general doesn't help in distributed computing; that is mainly done by technology like Kubernetes.

I would rate Red Hat's support around an eight; we have never had to call them as we could fix issues ourselves.

The object storage is with another vendor, and I cannot disclose it.

Setting up Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is fairly easy; we have automated that. The setup process is fairly easy. It takes maybe 15-20 minutes to set up RHEL.

I would say Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is definitely expensive. Compared to open-source Enterprise Linux like Rocky Linux or Alma, it's definitely very expensive. We use it mainly for web applications; it is very pricey for us, and I think they will be negotiating with Red Hat to lower the price.

I have experience with Red Hat solutions. I am familiar with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), specifically Enterprise Linux. I have more than 12 years of experience with Red Hat Linux. Currently, I use Red Hat on-premises. I use this product in the telecommunication industry. We use RHEL strictly on-prem. Overall, I would rate my experience with RHEL an eight.

I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for most of my career. It is primarily used as the base operating system on which various applications run. Currently, I am attempting to transition away from RHEL due to changes in the organization following IBM's acquisition.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is still considered better than Microsoft's offerings due to its superior handling of virtualization and faster performance. Microsoft often incorporates parts of RHEL's code, such as the networking stack, into its own products. The LEAP functionality for upgrades between versions is well-written and satisfactory.

RHEL has experienced a change in approach after being acquired by IBM, and the company has shifted away from open-source principles. The knowledge base is now outdated and lacks documentation for features in RHEL 9, relying instead on old documentation from RHEL 7. The introduction of unstable and undocumented products also detracts from the product's reliability.

I have used RHEL since it existed, so since 1991 or 1992.

RHEL has become less reliable due to undocumented updates and the release of unstable packages, which detracts from the product's stability.

Within the same vendor, moving workloads is easy. However, switching between vendors requires a significant migration effort.

The quality of Red Hat's support has declined in the past five to six years after outsourcing support to India. Complex issues are difficult to resolve due to communication challenges.

Negative

I have not switched from RHEL, but I am exploring alternatives such as Rocky Linux and Debian, which offer similar features without the high costs.

Setting up RHEL is quite straightforward, especially for someone familiar with it. The software asks the necessary questions for configuration, and the documentation generally explains these well.

The return on investment with RHEL is challenging to calculate but involves paying more upfront compared to Microsoft solutions for better reliability and stability, avoiding potential downtime costs.

The setup and licensing costs for RHEL are high, especially concerning support and associated applications. Red Hat charges high prices for support solutions like Ansible Tower, which can deter companies from using their products.

Other solutions evaluated include Ubuntu, Rocky Linux, and Debian. These alternatives offer similar functionality at a lower cost, especially concerning support.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a seven out of ten. People are now turning to other Linux distributions due to RHEL's declining quality and high costs. I suggest caution when considering Red Hat due to the divergence from its original open-source model.

Our primary infrastructure operating system is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, predominantly RHEL Eight. While some products utilize RHEL Seven, RHEL Eight point Zero is the standard for most of our operating systems and servers. However, server choices may vary based on specific industry requirements. Our underlying infrastructure relies almost exclusively on Linux distributions.

Our primary Linux installations use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in an on-premises VMware environment, with some instances deployed on AWS.

The built-in security features simplify risk reduction by allowing direct control of the root system's access.

Red Hat's knowledge base is excellent.

While Red Hat Leapp and Insights are helpful tools, they are not part of my daily workflow.

The web console is a good feature.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enhances uptime and security, boasting faster boot times than other operating systems.

The most valuable feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is its security, which is more secure than Windows. 

Integrating certificates from third-party clients into Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be challenging due to the operating system's stringent security policies.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scalable.

The technical support team was professional and quickly resolved our issue.

Positive

We use Oracle for our database, Ubuntu in our testing environment, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux in our production systems due to its increased stability.

The cloud migration from Red Hat Enterprise Linux Seven to Eight was straightforward due to the absence of underlying infrastructure complexities. However, the on-premises migration presented challenges from existing infrastructure dependencies, resulting in numerous errors.

The migration of approximately 200 servers required a team approach to ensure continuous monitoring. Although two people could have completed the migration, a four-person team completed it within two days. 

The migration from Red Hat Enterprise Linux Seven to Eight was done in-house.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a compelling value proposition for corporations due to its robust support infrastructure, which is essential for maintaining enterprise-level systems. However, the pricing model may be less attractive to individuals or small businesses. Compared to cloud-based platforms like AWS or Azure, which offer flexible pay-as-you-go options, RHEL's subscription-based model can become cost-prohibitive for those with limited budgets or smaller-scale projects.

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

We utilize Ansible to provision and patch our extensive server infrastructure. Ansible's automation capabilities enable efficient batching and management of security patches across all servers.

We test all the patches for some time before we add them to our production environment.

We utilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux in our private cloud and on-premises environments, but I've observed better performance in the cloud, likely due to the greater availability of resources.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux does require maintenance.