Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for configuration management of on-premise servers within the bank, making it a bank-wide solution.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is hosted in the cloud, but the use cases are for on-premises.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enabled centralized development by controlling deployments through features like sign-in, role-based access control, and Ansible Tower. The API integration enhanced control by standardizing deployments, providing oversight, and enabling management from a central location.

It facilitates easier environment management and performs well in that aspect, as we haven't encountered any issues.

Regarding the portability of applications for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the only tool we utilize is Ansible Tower. Its ease of use on servers and local machines, consistent interface and debugging process ensure a streamlined workflow regardless of the platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux significantly enhances the bank's capacity to manage numerous deployments. Its integration with Ansible Tower provides exceptional scalability, which has proven invaluable. Furthermore, the seamless integration change simplifies deployment management, making it substantially more efficient.

API integration streamlines connections with other tools, simplifying data sharing and enhancing workflow efficiency. Features like sign-in, role-based access control, and API integration provide crucial control over deployments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux packaging could be improved to simplify infrastructure maintenance and provisioning. While Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a robust operating system, managing it alongside external tools can present maintenance, provisioning, and compliance challenges. Streamlining the packaging process would enhance efficiency and ease of use for administrators.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a stable platform.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is highly scalable. By adding more hosts and doubling the number of VMs, it has successfully worked for our needs.

Technical support responds quickly to urgent issues, but minor bugs may take a considerable amount of time to resolve.

Neutral

Our projects utilized various solutions, including XLD and UCD, as well as some legacy technologies. Red Hat Enterprise Linux proved easier to configure than previous platforms, offering greater flexibility and alignment with current best practices.

While I lack direct deployment experience, I understand that Red Hat Enterprise Linux facilitates straightforward modifications, minimizing concerns about system disruptions.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers the greatest return on investment through its invaluable support, which is crucial for our critical applications. The comprehensive documentation and extensive resources, including Q&A and solutions to previous issues, are also essential.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers robust built-in security features that help with risk reduction, business continuity, and compliance. However, hosting external tools within a bank environment can create challenges in synchronizing policies and meeting security expectations. Ensuring the tool's security configurations align with the bank's server requirements can be complex, but this challenge is not unique to Ansible and is a common issue when integrating external tools into secure environments.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers greater control and a higher level of security compared to some open-source alternatives, which can be crucial for enterprise applications where stability and reliability are paramount. This focus on security is a key factor in choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

As an organization, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its stability and security.

I have worked with it on the cloud as well as on-premises. We use it with AWS.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is great when it comes to provisioning and patching. I am satisfied with it.

The user base and the knowledge base of Red Hat are way better than those of others. They make the user install and solve the issues easily.

We have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux Image Builder. It is a great tool for managing multiple systems. It can copy an exact image of my existing server to multiple servers. It is a great way to save time.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped us a lot. After switching from Ubuntu to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, there has been a drastic difference. The stability and the efficiency have enhanced greatly.

At the moment, we only have AWS cloud, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is working well. We have plans to switch to GCP.

The package manager of Red Hat is very convenient and efficient to use. With other Linux versions, such as Arch Linux and Ubuntu, package managers might not always be stable. When installing any software, the dependencies can vary, and there can be conflicts, whereas Red Hat has efficiently managed all of that so that users can install packages without any conflicts. We do not use the graphical interface, so the package manager and security features are mainly valuable to us.

After installation, the initial setup can be simplified or improved a little bit for new users coming from a distribution like Ubuntu or Windows. For example, for Arch, the user guide is very good. If a user does not have any experience, he or she can refer to the guide and install it successfully, whereas, for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the user needs to have some understanding of Linux.

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

It is very stable for us. I would rate it a ten out of ten for stability.

It is quite scalable. I would rate it an eight out of ten for scalability.

Before using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we were using Ubuntu as our main server. Ubuntu is more consumer-oriented, whereas Red Hat Enterprise Linux is more professional and work-oriented.

The main concern for us was how to get it installed perfectly. Before me, there was a fairly new person installing Red Hat, and he was not able to get it installed perfectly. The partitions were very differently implemented in Red Hat than in Ubuntu. That was one of the major issues for him.

My colleague was handling the main setup, but he was not able to figure out how to get everything to work. He was able to install it with the ISO, but he could not set up partitioning and Wi-Fi drivers. It was complicated for him because he knew Ubuntu, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux was complicated for him. We had to refer to the documentation for our network drivers and then we could get our Red Hat Enterprise Linux working. It took us around three to four hours.

In terms of maintenance, timely patching is required.

Overall, we have about 1,000 users of these servers, but we are the only ones who work with these servers. No one else in the company operates these servers because one mistake can bring down the entire server.

It saves us time. There are about 40% savings.

It is cost-efficient for the tasks it does and the improvements that it brings. For a professional environment, it is very cost-efficient. It was easy to purchase the subscription.

If a user is using it for commercial purposes, I would not recommend it. If a user is using it as a server or a workstation, I would recommend it.

We do not use the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Web Console much. We only use it for the initial steps to configure the users. Other than that, we do not use it much.

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

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux to create directories and files and configure security settings for the Red Hat Certified System Administrator exam.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux comprehensively covers the fundamental knowledge required for the Red Hat Certified System Administrator and Red Hat Certified Engineer certifications. My experience taking the Red Hat examination was positive, and I am satisfied with their product.

I can easily work with Red Hat OS because it is user-friendly, even for manual tasks. While it may be as expensive as Windows, they offer a four-month trial and provide cloud access. This is valuable for understanding Linux concepts and working within the Linux environment. Overall, it's a great learning experience.

We prefer not to install the Linux OS manually, so we opt to work in the cloud instead. The cloud platform provides a real-time experience, enabling us to practice for exams easily and enhance our Linux knowledge. This proves highly beneficial for students pursuing Red Hat certification.

While preparing for the Red Hat administrator examination, I worked with the cloud platform, which was generally good but occasionally experienced some lag. Sometimes, the platform would be very slow, making it difficult to open labs. It could take around 30 minutes to start a lab, and there were limitations on data persistence. Any work or files created would only be available for one week before disappearing, requiring recreation. This lack of long-term storage is a disadvantage of the Red Hat Cloud platform.

I am currently using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I would rate the stability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux seven out of ten because of the lagging.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scalable.

The support team was helpful in addressing the lag in the cloud.

Neutral

I used UNIX before switching to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. UNIX did not provide adequate support for developers, making it challenging to work with. Though it's open source, UNIX lacked the features that we needed. So, I transitioned to Red Hat. Red Hat offers developers extensive support and access to technologies like OpenShift and Kubernetes. This makes it easier for developers and large companies to manage workloads and adopt new technologies.

I installed UNIX on my laptop and experienced no lag, unlike the lag I've encountered in the cloud with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Installing Red Hat is easy. We download the file and run it in our labs.

One Red Hat license costs USD 131, which I find reasonable.

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

We have 15 members in our group that use Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It's much faster than UNIX and offers extensive management support, making it valuable for startups and engineering developers.

I use the solution in my company for regular servers with databases, load balancers, Apache, and so on.

The benefits of using the product revolve around the fact that it has made it easier to automate everything on it, which includes automating servers and so on.

The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is an upcoming, more stable product, like Oracle OS. The tool has everything that IBM Red Hat Redbooks has.

In terms of how I would assess the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for keeping our organization agile and flexible, I would say that since my company is a service provider, we get the containers from the customers, which we don't use for our own selves, but we use Red Hat Universal Base Images (UBI) 9 for some things like to to get our own containers and so on.

My company has not tried to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 since we are still using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8. In the future, I am expecting to see Podman 5.0 released for RHEL 9.

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

It is a nice and stable solution. Some problems may occur with the product if you don't patch it after a year or two.

There are no problems with the scalability of the product, as it works fine.

Previously, my company used to use a simple version of RHEL and other tools depending on the needs of our company's customers.

Regarding my experience related to the deployment process, I would say that everything is automated now. You just fill out the survey, and then you just deploy the tool. The product's deployment phase is easy.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The team members can deploy the solution in my company.

If the customer wants to pay for the support and so on, then we can go for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Otherwise, one can go for any other open-source platform. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), you get the latest on everything. If you are running Oracle Linux, it gets hard to find some patches. It is easy to find new things like Podman or Red Hat Subscription-Manager, especially if you want to run something on Oracle OS, then you need to compile the patches yourself.

The product has helped centralize development in our company. In our company, we are mostly automating all the server installations on Red Hat template by filling in IP addresses with Postman.

We don't use the built-in features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance since they are only available in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source cloud-based operating systems for Linux other than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I would say that previously people preferred CentOS until Red Hat stripped it apart. At the moment, it is like, if you want an RHEL-based tool, it is either Rocky Linux or Oracle OS because I think Fedora is too lenient, while CentOS is somewhere in the middle.

I would be spending the same amount of time on some other solution if I was not using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since everything is automated now, and in such a case, it will just be another image you use on some other product.

My company uses Ansible as a part of the deployment model.

The product is easy to use, and you can get support whenever you want. The solution also   the latest packages, which include Red Hat Subscription-Manager, Podman, Linux, and other such functionalities.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

As a system administrator, I specialize in building infrastructure on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, with a focus on automation from initial design through to implementation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has significantly helped our company grow by enabling automation, allowing us to provide multiple services simultaneously and reduce repetitive tasks through the creation and sharing of solutions with other teams.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enabled us to centralize development.

Ansible is one of my most-used tools, and I especially appreciate its automation capabilities.

While Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers many valuable features, some, particularly the latest ones, are not immediately available until deployed on-premises. Additionally, although I need to become fully acquainted with its built-in security features, the dashboards could be enhanced to provide more comprehensive security insights.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable. I've never had any problems with its stability.

The scalability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is.

The customer support and technical support are good. Normally, I can find my own solutions and if not, I can reach out to the vendor for assistance.

Positive

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

We face restrictions in accessing the latest features for various tools, including Elastic and Red Hat. For instance, we cannot utilize certain Elastic features because they are not publicly available. Similarly, with Red Hat, we must wait for the newest features to be released on-premises before we can access them. This limitation hinders our ability to leverage the most up-to-date technology.

The key advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux over other open-source Linux distributions is its comprehensive support, which includes access to updates, security patches, and technical expertise.

The use of the solution keeps varying, considering that we have web apps and a lot of homegrown stuff as we build a lot of our own apps. My company also uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the operating systems for a lot of our other applications that we use for authentication purposes and so on.

I can't really talk much about how the product has benefited the organization since it is not in my wheelhouse, and I mostly deal with the area of configuration management and the automation of configuring it. In my company, we have a Unix team I work with, and when they want to automate processes, then they come to me and I help direct them.

The solution's most valuable feature revolves around its simplicity, especially when maintaining it, which is an easy process.

I have not seen anything in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that causes any queries or doubts in my mind, so I am not really sure if I see any need for improvements in the product at this point, especially when I have good communication with the sales teams and support. I have also recommended the changes I want to see in Ansible, an area where my company sees progress. There is nothing my company is disappointed about regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I would like to see a better way to organize the jobs within Ansible, specifically with the automation platform. Right now, in Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, everything is just flat as there are no directory structures or folders and no ways to designate specific jobs for specific things as everything is in one big pile.

With Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), my company has not seen anything requiring improvements. My company is really happy with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). My company is still in the migration process right now since, from all of our seven boxes, we are moving on to the eight and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9. The aforementioned process has been really smooth and slick. My company likes the speed and simplicity of the OS.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for twelve years. My company has been using the product since before I joined.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution.

I went to have dinner with my sales team the previous night, and we just had a chat, after which I got to know some professional services offered by some people willing to come and help our company with the solution if required. Based on the aforementioned area, I can rate support as ten out of ten.

Positive

My company has experience with AIX, Solaris, and Windows. My company switched over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because people wanted it, specifically the app developers. My company uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) based on supply and demand factors. You just build what is needed for the infrastructure side or when you are in the operations.

The product's deployment phase was simple.

There is a different group in my company that has built up a strategy to deploy the product, so I don't have to do anything in its deployment phase. To request a new system is just a matter of filling out the ticket and submitting it easily, after which the box is built, which is great.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The deployment phase for the tool was carried out with the help of our company's in-house team. The product was deployed with the help of vRealize Orchestrator Appliance.

In terms of the ROI associated with the product, I would say that with a lot of stuff I do in the company, I also get involved with the patching side, especially the patching of servers. I can patch 1,500 Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) boxes in the time it takes me to patch ten boxes from Windows. Patching in Windows is bad. Being able to patch Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is simple since I think the most I have ever seen it takes is around 35 minutes to patch a box. When our company started to move towards a more containerized approach, we saw that being able to have your container or your OS can open a whole new world. Being able to spin up systems and have multiple systems that are already pre-patched, I don't have to have downtime for the enterprise.

There were a couple of operating systems, including CentOS, which my company looked at before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as it offered a strong support model. The consistency offered by the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was also one of the other reasons why my company chose it over other tools.

Though my company does not currently have a hybrid cloud environment with the tool, we are working on it since regulatory compliances in the banking sector require us to stay compliant. My company is not in a place where we can just jump into cloud infrastructure, but we do hope to do so in the future. Presently, the product is on an on-premises model.

As I am not required to deal with the developers in our company, I don't know if the product has helped centralize developments.

My company uses Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for containerization projects. The product has made dealing with containerization projects easy for my company since we get to use a lot of Kubernetes and Docker platforms that snap right into Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and works.

Considering the built-in security features offered by the tool for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance, I prefer Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) over a lot of other products. Our company is like an Active Directory shop, so we are doing a lot of tying to it, which is a little bit disappointing, but it is just business. I like the security end of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I also like the way the file handling takes place along with its management part, so I have no issues with the tool.

Speaking about the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to keep our organization agile, I would say that it is something that will happen in the future as my company is a slow adopter. I am not really sure why it has been slow. My company does have a new organization that is really focusing on opening up new avenues so that we can actually be more agile and have the ability to move to things like OpenShift and having our containers offer more high availability while not having any downtime.

I don't use Red Hat Insights.

If I have to speak to a colleague who is looking at open-source cloud-based operating systems for Linux, I would say that CentOS or Fedora are good options since both products have had an association with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for a long time. I personally like and prefer CentOS.

I would not be able to comment on whether the Red Hat portfolio has affected our total cost of ownership across our enterprise landscape because we just spin them up and keep building them. My company was primarily an AIX house, using Solaris and a lot of Windows boxes from Windows. Right now, my company has gotten rid of the AIX and Solaris systems, and now we are down to about a 50-50 split when it comes to Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). There have been times when we have had more Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) boxes in our company over the ones from Windows. I can see that in the near future, my company is going to be more of a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) shop than an organization that has boxes from Windows.

In terms of the deployment model, I would say that my company has three data centers, mostly where VMware is used.

I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

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.