Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux primarily for our entire group because most of our applications are based on Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has robust built-in security features.

It has an extensive knowledge base.

We used to patch our systems manually, and now we use Red Hat Satellite to manage the patching of our systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a good way to manage our OS.

It has enhanced both our uptime and security. The system's stability has eliminated any noticeable security issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to achieve security standards certification, which has allowed us to maintain business operations without interruption.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a stable and supported platform with valuable built-in security features that help reduce risk and maintain compliance.

The cost of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a bit high. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's support could be improved by offering human support in addition to their documentation. While their documentation is helpful, it can be frustrating to be referred to it instead of receiving direct assistance from a support representative.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable overall.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scalable.

Red Hat's support is generally good, but their response time and overall competence could be improved. Occasionally, we are referred to their documents when requesting assistance, which can be frustrating.

Positive

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a yearly subscription cost for the licensing that includes maintenance and support.

We evaluated Microsoft Windows Server, Ubuntu Server, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux before ultimately choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

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

I recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its support and stability.

Our memory-intensive applications run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We opted for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our workloads due to its stability and the comprehensive support provided.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize our development to some degree.

We use it in containerization projects for workloads that need to run in private clouds, as it simplifies the process of shipping them as containers. The advantage of this approach is standardization, while the disadvantage is the necessity of shipping the container itself. Deploying containers on a platform like Kubernetes running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux may require some extra steps for scalability, but it is not a significant obstacle.

I appreciate that Red Hat Enterprise Linux, as a foundation for hybrid cloud deployments, is a commercial solution with reliable support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has performed well for our business critical applications.

We extensively use Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features because they are excellent.

Red Hat Insights has significantly helped us reduce risk in our environment by allowing us to identify which CVEs are impacting our systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux contributes to business continuity and compliance efforts by simplifying OS migration. Its generational upgrade path allows for easy transitions between versions, streamlining the process and reducing potential disruptions.

The time saved during audits and the ability to map CVEs using Red Hat Insight are valuable security benefits.

It helps avoid emergencies stemming from security issues, non-compliant settings, or unpatched systems.

Red Hat Insights provides the tools for proactive environment management. For example, it simplifies patch verification by confirming the desired automatic patching functioned correctly in one fleet, suggesting its likely success in the next. This clear visibility makes it easy to monitor ongoing operations.

Red Hat's portfolio helps lower the total cost of ownership for our enterprise landscape by providing reliable documentation that simplifies troubleshooting and reduces the need to resolve issues from scratch. 

Red Hat Insights provides good visibility and proactive management of our environment.

The primary issues are related to integration. Red Hat Insights utilizes several APIs that lack proper communication, resulting in inconsistent results.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for about four years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself doesn't have issues. It performs well for our business-critical applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux scales quite well, allowing us to adapt as needs change.

While the support is generally good, prompt attention often requires escalating issues or marking them as high importance.

Positive

Red Hat Enterprise Linux saves time with good documentation and other benefits.

The licensing is a bit odd because we need to procure the licenses from a third party. We prefer a pay-as-you-go model with monthly increments instead of buying licenses in bulk that expire in a year.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten. While it has occasional bugs and software flakiness, updates are regularly released to address these issues.

To ensure your operations are compatible across different operating systems, prioritize OS agnosticism. Unless modifying the OS is a core function, consider a commercial solution like Red Hat. Although cost-effective, Red Hat may not be suitable for all companies.

Our banking applications, primarily those focused on transactional data services, operate on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We run our workloads on Red Hat Enterprise Linux due to its compliance and long support cycle.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development by providing a standardized image that we customize for developer laptops, developer environments, virtual machines, and production machines.

Our containerization projects run on OpenShift, a virtualized platform based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, where we deploy and manage our workloads and applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a high-performing operating system that effectively supports our business-critical operations, including high-latency, high-throughput applications essential for transaction services.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has robust built-in security features that effectively reduce risk in our environment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux significantly contributes to our business continuity and compliance efforts by inherently supporting various compliance standards, including PCI and others. This built-in compliance functionality is a major advantage, as it simplifies the process of meeting regulatory requirements and provides robust evidence for audits. Ultimately, Red Hat Enterprise Linux streamlines our compliance procedures and strengthens our overall security posture.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux portfolio helps reduce our TCO.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a strong foundation for compliance and offers extended support, which is particularly valuable for critical upgrades and assistance.

To enhance Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would like to see more focus on improving performance and tools such as compilers.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers high performance for our business-critical operations, especially for high-latency throughput applications that are critical for transaction services.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is flexible, and we always get support from the team if something is not working.

The customer support and technical service from Red Hat is good. When we needed support, such as for Java 21, we received early access. However, it's rarely the case that we need support.

Positive

The most significant return on investment is the long-term support, as we don't need to worry about support over an extended period. It ensures the continuation of service.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux licensing is not cheap, but it is worth it, especially considering the compliance and support it provides.

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

If you're considering a third-party Linux OS, try Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It offers a free subscription for developers, and if it suits your needs, you can easily transition to the production-ready Red Hat Enterprise Linux nine.

Most of our tech applications are based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for most of our workloads and applications because it is an enterprise-grade operating system with regular security patches, reliable support, and a guarantee against hacking. Using a different OS would leave us vulnerable to security risks and complicate upgrades.

Currently, 70 percent of our Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment is deployed on-premises, while the remaining 30 percent resides in the cloud.

We utilize Ansible to automate the deployment of numerous Red Hat Enterprise Linux modules. This centralized approach, managed by a single Ansible engine, streamlines our development process.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux performs well for our business critical applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features satisfy our security requirements.

Red Hat mitigates risk by rapidly releasing patches for identified vulnerabilities, which is crucial for mission-critical applications.

It offers stability that enhances business continuity, simplifying upgrades, even for minor releases. Its compatibility with OpenSCAP, which provides profiles for various compliance benchmarks, streamlines compliance testing.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides regular security patches and proper support, allowing me to focus more on application management than worrying about the operating system.

It helped us avoid emergencies caused by security issues. The CVE reporting and knowledge base are valuable resources.

Red Hat Insights provides the tools for proactive environment management by identifying potential vulnerabilities, such as CVEs before they become a problem. This allows for advanced knowledge of system vulnerabilities and provides specific remediation guidance, which is more efficient than relying on regular scans.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped reduce our total cost of ownership.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is an enterprise-grade solution where we receive regular security patches and proper support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux was not used for containerization due to its mutable nature, unlike CoreOS, a lightweight and immutable Red Hat Enterprise Linux variant designed explicitly for containerization and optimized for running authorization.

I am testing AI workloads, and I'm not sure if Red Hat Enterprise Linux is fully equipped. It might not accommodate AI workloads as effectively as needed.

Some Red Hat applications, such as Ansible for automation, are considerably more expensive than the average open-source solution.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 16 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable, and I have not encountered issues compared to other applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scalable.

Red Hat's stability has meant I haven't needed their support for years, but when I did contact them previously, their response was quite fast. While their support for OpenShift is acceptable, I do have some concerns about it.

Positive

A stable OS allows me to focus more on applications, lowering the cost of managing the infrastructure.

Red Hat is stable, and we always opt for the lower-tier subscription, which is affordable. It doesn't have unexpected issues that require a premium subscription.

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

It is important to assess the risk and use case before choosing a third-party Linux OS. For mission-critical applications, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides insights and rich features like the patching cycle.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is just a piece of an operating system for my company, and what we need the most is STIG compliance because we have a lot of different customers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped my company since, with it, we have gotten more customers. Now, our company can say upfront that we use Red Hat and are STIG compliant while also being security-focused, which really helps open up the door to people who want to get their stuff done.

The most valuable feature of the solution is its good integration with Ansible.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not helped centralize development in our company, especially since we deal with unique use cases in our organization. My company still develops locally on CentOS, but once our company actually completes the product for our customer, it gets shipped somewhere else and we can't centralize things since we don't have that much time to spare owing to which we stay disconnected after the aforementioned process.

My company plans to use the product for containerization projects, especially since we are in the process of converting to Kubernetes.

Based on my assessment of the the built-in security features when it comes to areas like risk reduction, business continuity, and compliance, I would say that I am a big fan of the tool.

In terms of the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to keep our organization agile, it has been pretty good since all the containers have been very portable without having to deal with any environmental issues.

If I had to give a suggestion to a colleague who is looking at open-source cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I would say that one should look at AlmaLinux since it is the closest thing one can get to Red Hat.

The product's deployment model is usually in a single data center, and it consists of one machine at a time. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) does not use a public cloud.

The documentation is an area of concern where improvements are required. Sometimes, I go to look at stuff in the tool's documentation to see how to configure something, and it doesn't make any sense. The tool's documentation is written by someone who already knows how it works for those who need to learn how it works. Everything else in the documentation is really good, though. I would describe the documentation as a kind of a hit or miss.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for about six months.

It is a scalable solution.

I would like to expand the use of the product in the future, but our company's business model is contract-based and very slow, which makes it difficult to work with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

As per my evaluation of the technical support offered by the product, I would consider the support services offered to be at a 50-50 rate since everything really depends on who you get to talk to from the support team. Some of the people from the product's support team to whom we reached out didn't understand our use cases or our problems, so they couldn't help us at all. Some of the support staff members who understood what our company meant when it came to the issues associated with the product were able to help us in 30 seconds. My colleagues who contacted the product's support team were satisfied with the technical team's services. I rate the technical support a six out of ten.

Neutral

In my company, we used to use CentOS. Now that CentOS has reached the end of life phase, it doesn't meet our company's needs, so we transitioned to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Previously in my company, we used to use CentOS. CentOS will reach the end of life phase in the upcoming month, which is the reason why my company had to choose another product like Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The solution is used on an on-premises model.

Deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was surprisingly easy. The installers were the same as the ones used for other solutions.

My company did not have a strategy to deploy the product since we just needed Red Hat to hurry up, put it on a box, and figure it out.

My company did not seek the help of a third party to help us with the product's deployment phase.

The biggest ROI I have experienced from the use of the solution revolves around the area of customer satisfaction. My company's customers who use the product have a lot less to be changed in the product and it has helped save a lot of development and redevelopment time for our organization.

The cost and setup are not areas that are transparent for me. The tool's licensing part has been a real pain because when our company sells a system to a customer, they take full control of it in their data center, and we are not allowed to access it, even though they bought it from us. The license transfer has always been really awkward because our company initially had the license until our customers tested it and accepted the product. I was hoping to find somebody to talk to about the license transfer part with Red Hat products, but I don't know where to find someone associated with the solution.

My company briefly evaluated a product named Debian, but after that, our company's customers specifically asked us to go for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Considering that the licensing part associated with the product is a pain, I rate the tool a seven out of ten.

We first used it for application installation to run applications on Windows. We had it running on Windows. We then upgraded it. It was still on the IBM platform, but it was still x86. We have now updated it, and it is now running on IBM Linux Z.

We use it for Internet banking, core banking applications, and other peripheral applications.

It has helped with consolidation. When we first started to do clusters, we were using Oracle cluster and Red Hat cluster. The Red Hat cluster was more stable than the Oracle cluster, so we had to uninstall the Oracle cluster and just use the Red Hat feature to have floating IP addresses between two cluster nodes. Having it in a cluster was the single most useful application of Red Hat in the environment.

We use Red Hat Insights, Ansible, and Satellite. Red Hat Insights is helping us big time. A year ago, I was looking at bolstering my team to about five or so administrators. With Red Hat Insights and other tools, I am satisfied with just two administrators. They are there just to manage the system and not necessarily go down into the trenches.

It seems that Red Hat Insights provides vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance, but my team would know that better. I manage a team that does that.

Its stability is most valuable. Its administrative aspect is also good. It is relatively easy to administer. I am familiar with AIX. AIX is super easy. I did not have to struggle much to adapt to Red Hat.

They can make the extended file system dynamic. Currently, we have to bring down the server to add an Hdisk. We cannot extend the database on the fly. We have to have downtime. We want to ensure that we make the blackout periods as minimal as possible. Currently, there is a gap in the file system management. I want to be able to expand the file system in a simpler way and have the application or the database use that expansion without any downtime.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2004. It has been 20 years.

There is no problem with stability. It is stable. We have a couple of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 still running. We also have Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 systems. The hardware is functional, but the application was retired. We cannot get an update for it. It has been running since 2008.

Its scalability is fine. There is no problem with scalability. We can do it in real-time. Now with containers and other things, we can scale on the fly without much downtime. We can build a small system and scale it. We can start at a much lower level than several others.

It has improved tremendously. I remember when it used to be centralized. I have been to North Carolina to get training, but now they can come to us for the training. The whole support architecture has improved. We can reserve hours for calls when the need arises. If we do not use it, it is reallocated the next month to some other project. They are doing well. I am impressed.

Positive

We were using and still are using AIX, but most of the applications have been imported, so we are between AIX and Red Hat. We are also using Windows, but Red Hat has stood out. It is not yet there with AIX, but it is getting there.

We were using Ubuntu and a few other flavors, but they were not organized. They were still too open. The support and the training for Red Hat Enterprise Linux was spot on. It was exemplary. We could find support easily.

We have them in clusters, and we also have standalone ones. We have DR where we synchronize with DR. We synchronize at the file system level with DR, which eliminates some of the application limitations.

We are using it on-prem, but we have applications to be upgraded in another 18 months, which would be a hybrid cloud.

Its installation the first time was overwhelming. Once you get used to it, the team settles down, and you have knowledgeable people, it is a breeze.

We have an integrator, a reseller, and a consultant. Somebody would come in and help us connect the dots. I guess that is their reseller, and then the integrator helps us properly connect the dots.

Pedro is our accounts manager. He probably comes from Puerto Rico, and then there is Lincoln Walters from Jamaica. Together, they help us identify the resources we need for the things that we want to do.

The biggest ROI is in terms of the reduction of human resources required to manage and maintain it. The administrative duties have been vastly reduced. You can even have resources from Red Hat. They have something where you can block certain hours a month and you can just use them as needed. If you do not use them entirely, you can reallocate them. That means you can reallocate unused resources. There are savings on investment.

We are still learning about it, but our TCO has reduced because we do not have to have as much manpower, hardware, and processes to manage and operate.

Licensing is the most attractive part of it. With Red Hat Insights and Ansible, we now know that it was done with the intention of simplifying the licensing so that you get the support for what you have and not necessarily what you want to have.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not helped us to centralize development. We have not capitalized on that as yet. I am here at the Red Hat Summit to learn about Kubernetes and containers. It is all new to me, and at this point, I do not know from where to start. I am getting exposed to so many things, but I still need to understand from where to start. I need to know the foundations. In about 18 months, we will be going to containers. We have people developing Dockers, Kubernetes, and other things, but we need to find a way to integrate them. We will have containers running on OpenShift, but we need to know how to secure, store, and manage those containers.

I have participated in a few presentations, and I see that there are prescribed ways to ensure that you maintain compliance by upgrading. In one of the presentations, one of the presenters said to not expand or scale too quickly because some of the applications get left behind. That is something that I am taking away.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be good for keeping our organization agile. It is flexible. They say, "Build once and run anywhere." That is the buzzword for me.

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 Linux is for beginners, whereas Red Hat Enterprise Linux comes with the bells and whistles and the stability for business. It is an enterprise-grade software.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten. There is innovation and adaptability. Ten years ago, it was unheard of. It has grown, and it has been growing tremendously.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for running various things. We have a lot of virtual machines. The applications that are running on it are a bunch of shell scripts for processing orders, marketing campaigns, generating reports, or running some Java applications.

We have the customization capability. We can easily customize it, and we can also automate and deploy it. I have a command line interface. I am a command line junkie, and I am able to use that, config files, and Ansible to be able to easily figure out what I need to do to automate things. It feels like I know what it is doing and how to make it do what I want. I do not have to weave some magical arcane hack the way I have to do in Windows.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development in a lot of ways. We have it hooked in through our GitHub. We are trying to combine where we are storing things and then have a standard way of how we are deploying things and have some standard configurations. With every single server, we do not have to worry about how to set this up because we are doing the same thing the same way. We can just do it across the board, and then we only have to worry about the interesting parts.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features are great for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance. There are published CVEs, and there is SELinux, which I do not use and I always turn it off. Firewalls and tooling around that make it easy to use. The automation on top of that makes it easy to configure. With a push of a button, it is done.

We do not have to worry too much about portability. We are coming from Oracle Linux. We were primarily an Oracle Linux shop, and because that is based on it, it just works. We have not had any issues.

The fact that it is Linux is valuable. Why I like it in general is that I know what it is doing. I can figure out what it is doing, and I can make it do what I want. I am not delving into arcane registry things.

I am still trying to figure out the features it has. There is so much that it can do. What it does really well is that it allows you to do things.

It was probably 2008 when I first started using it. The company was using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and I was with the internal help desk supporting the Linux side.

Its stability is great. It is stable and rock-solid.

Its scalability is also great. It does not matter if the host is beefy or not. It is just going to run on it, and it is going to handle the work. Whether you have a couple of cores or 64 cores, it is just going to do it.

Their support is good. There is good responsiveness. They quickly get me to the person who knows the answer, but I have not used them much.

Positive

We were using Oracle Linux. We are switching because of some of the things. Oracle licensing has been a point of frustration. Their support is comparably difficult to work with, and the support documentation is a mess.

Red Hat is so much easier to navigate. It has been overall a much more pleasant experience to work with Red Hat.

We are using it on-prem, and then our cloud is a Kubernetes cluster on AWS, so it is basically on-prem.

Our deployment model is a manual kickstart with Ansible for configuration. My experience with deployment is good. I kickstart it and then hit it with Ansible, and it is done. It is very easy.

I did the deployment on my own.

We have not yet seen an ROI. It has not been in for long enough. There are no savings in terms of manhours because the actual day-to-day usage remains the same with Oracle Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, getting some of the metrics with Red Hat Insights is going to be helpful as we get into a better patching cycle. I am anticipating an easier life.

We are expecting an overall decline in the costs because of the differences between the Red Hat licensing and Oracle licensing. We are expecting a net decrease in overall cost. For using it, other than the license, there is no cost.

The setup cost is non-existent. With licensing, there was a little snafu because I misread something. There was a slight learning curve because we use virtual data center licensing. We had to understand how it all maps. We had to understand how that mapping works when the hypervisors are Red Hat or VMware. There is a slight learning curve, but it worked out. It ends up being easy.

I did not evaluate other options mainly because I have had experience with it before. From my prior experience, I already knew what I wanted.

We are trying to use Red Hat Insights. I need to finish updating the playbooks to hook our host. We are in the midst of transitioning from Oracle Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I have not fully hooked everything in, but we will be using Red Hat Insights.

We just started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. We have not yet seen any impact of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on containerization projects.

If a colleague is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a lot of it would depend on their use case, what they are going to need for it, and whether they have an enterprise environment. There is a cost associated with it which can be a downside. I am an open-source lover. I do not like paying for stuff, but I get it. They need to look at the cost, and if the cost is prohibitive, they need to look at something that is compatible and as similar as possible.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten. I generally do not give out a ten. There needs to be something spectacular for a ten, so that is my personal bias against the top of the scale.

We are a Linux shop, so a lot of our engineers are familiar with Linux. We try to push Red Hat Enterprise Linux instead of Windows. The reason for it in the beginning was licensing. Some of it was because of the way the contract was set up. It was cheaper, but we do use it now just for the ease of it. I do not know if it is because of Ansible, which we use for a lot of our day-to-day operations, that we tend to lean more toward Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has affected our system's uptime or security. I know Microsoft publishes zero-day vulnerabilities for Windows as fast as Red Hat, but we noticed that in terms of problems or alerts that we get for attacks or viruses, there is not anything on the Red Hat side. That is why we feel that it is more secure. It might be just the nature of Red Hat where all services and ports are off. It is not like Windows where everything is on, and you have to turn it on. I was having a conversation with one of the gentlemen who is also attending the Red Hat conference, and I got to know that there are built-in NIST features with Red Hat that we could turn on, so we do not have to try to figure out how to harden our system.

The testing of the updates or the packages of the kernel is valuable because I used to be a part of the Fedora project. I know it is all vetted out before it gets to production, but a majority of it is the support and the relationships I have with the Red Hat employees assigned to our account.

As they move over to newer versions, certain things change, which is expected as the technology matures or new things come out, but what really surprises me are the features that are there in the cloud, such as Red Hat Insights. They are not there on-prem. There are a lot of things on the cloud portal that I did not notice before, and I was surprised because we were unaware of them. Red Hat is doing a lot of investment in that sense.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is good. It is easy to parse through all of the knowledge base. I do not know if Windows does it because I have not looked at it, but in Red Hat's knowledge base, there are a lot of things. They fast-track a lot of things in their knowledge base, even when they are not yet official. Especially with the tie-in with Bugzilla, even though it is not a true KB, we can see and follow if other people in the world are hitting a certain problem or something similar to what we are experiencing. I like that.

It would be great to have an overview of how various Red Hat products work together. They can show how to tie all those pieces together and how to have the products that we work together for our day-to-day processes.

I started with the company around 2012, and they have been using it even before then. At that time, it was Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, and now, we are up to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.

In 10 or 11 years of using Red Hat solutions, I have opened only one or two support tickets. It probably was something during a patch and during Satellite 5 to Satellite 6 migration. I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

In Linux, there are so many different flavors, but I am partial to Red Hat because I have been a part of the Fedora project. At our place, we have only two operating systems: Microsoft Windows and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I know CentOS, but that is usually because the appliance from the vendor was set up using that. That is why we had a few instances of CentOS in the past, but nowadays, I do not see any other flavors of Linux.

For the majority of our use cases for Red Hat, we have on-prem deployments. There are some things that they are trying to spin up on AWS. I do not know if they are cloud-native apps or not, but I know our developers are now moving on to it.

I have been involved in the initial setup, upgrades, and migration of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I did not have any problems while going from major OS versions. I always push new upgrades or homogeneous migrations, such as from version 6 to version 7 to version 8. There is probably an option to upgrade in place. Overall, with Red Hat OS, I have not seen many problems. A long time ago, when they went from Python 2 to Python 3, there were certain things we had to change in the script.

I know that Red Hat is moving to Wayland from X11, but I do not see any problems there. From Satellite 5 to 6, it was a bit hard in the beginning, but now, it is pretty self-explanatory. Overall, everything about which we had questions was very well documented.

In terms of our upgrade and/or migration plans to stay current, first, we look at the EOL and the roadmap of Red Hat because of security. We used to offer every single version before the said EOL happened, but now, we just do an n-minus-one. We try to maintain the newest and one level below version. SAP users are the biggest Red Hat Enterprise Linux users in our environment. They have a particular PAM and upgrade path that they have to do with Red Hat. We also wait to be certified to certain versions, but our main strategy is the newest and one major version down. We try to get everybody off the other versions.

Our provisioning is all done using VMware products. We have a vRealize automation, now called the Aria automation, to spin it up. Patching is done through Satellite. I do not do it, but when I watch them doing it, it seems it is just using remote SSH commands against the list of non-prod and prod servers. It is something simple. We do not seem to be doing anything complicated. I am wondering if there is a better way to do versioning control or patching and whatnot, but currently, it is very simple.

I am satisfied with the management experience not only in terms of patching but also the day zero to day one or day two stuff. We are interested in utilizing Ansible to eliminate human error and whatnot. During provisioning, we have Pearl scripts that we have to manually trigger. I know we can use Ansible for that, but it comes down to the cost of entry which is still very high. 

A lot of people are moving into the core count for licensing. We still have a few with one-to-one standard server licensing, but we are utilizing the virtualization host licensing. We license it based on the host, not based on VMs, which is cool. I was very happy that there was certain licensing with SAP to have access to SAP repos. Its cost was the same as the regular one, so I was happy about that.

The only pricing that bugs me right now is the Ansible pricing. We wanted to take a look at Ansible, but the biggest thing a year back with Ansible was that the management did not want to spend half a million on Ansible Tower. They wanted to see first if we would use it and not waste money. I do not know if things have changed now, but Ansible is probably still expensive. That is one of the routes that we want to go to. We will see if we can utilize Ansible Tower, so pricing-wise, that is the only thing that pops up. It is too expensive. The cost of entry seems quite high.

Overall, I do not see any issues with what we have spent on Red Hat. We also have learning subscriptions that we pay to Red Hat for the training, and I do not feel we have wasted any money.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has built-in features, but we do not use them. It is one of the things about which I need to talk to our account manager. There are so many different ways to skin a cat. My department has so much money, so they bought everything, but a lot of the security features, such as SELinux, are disabled for us. We handle the firewall rules, access lists, and other things at another location rather than on the actual VM itself. It does not hurt to do it at multiple places, but operations-wise, it would be a nightmare, so we try not to do it. I know there are a lot of cool new things built in Red Hat, and that is something we should circle back and take a look at.

I have seen Red Hat Insights. I clicked on it one time when our account manager was showing us something. They have so many features in the cloud that we do not know we can use. Maybe it is wrong to assume, but the reason I do not look at Red Hat Insights is that a part of our patching is already included. We are not that strict about what we patch in terms of the versions. It is useful, but Red Hat emails us anyway. They tell about the severity of an issue. We do not look at Red Hat Insights. We see those emails and we see CVEs. If a package is installed and applicable to our VMs, we just use Satellite and patch that particular vulnerability. 

I have also tried the web console once. It looked interesting, but we do not have much use for it because a lot of our customers or application owners are server admins. About 99% of our Red Hat installs are all minimal installs. We do not have a GUI. There is just a terminal screen. Even though they could console in and do whatnot, it is all done via SSH.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a 10 out of 10.