Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

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.

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.

We have a multitude of use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux within our organization. We have machines running this operating system, and in our landscape, we also have combined database services.

We are currently using it on-premises but have a roadmap towards a hybrid cloud solution. Because of the way our business operates, it is something that we utilize only on-prem currently.

They are a technology enabler for us. It is a part of one of the core functions in the organization, where the operating system supports running various services, not just on devices but also SQL-based services and applications. They are definitely a technology-enabling organization for us. 

We have the ability to manage all of our infrastructures in one area. The support is also there. We utilize it in our organization due to the fact that it is very good.

The regular updates and fixes from them for vulnerabilities help with risk reduction. To maintain compliance, we have a relationship with the vendor. They assist us in making sure that we have all our vulnerabilities covered. From a business continuity perspective, we make sure that we use the technology to its best capability.

Red Hat Lightspeed provides vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance. It definitely minimizes your downtime. You have more proactive monitoring than reactive monitoring. A lot of the tools out there only give you the capability to handle something that has already happened. This is something that enables you to be more proactive and do your patch management for security vulnerabilities and so forth.

The high availability capability and the support functions we get from Red Hat Enterprise Linux are among the most valuable features. 

Also, Red Hat Lightspeed is a key feature. You have a central view of all of the infrastructure in the organization. It is definitely something that other organizations need to invest in. It also streamlines things. You have the capability to have reporting, insights, and other things within one space.

One area for improvement could be moving towards a more agile DevOps way of working. Other technologies out there have enabled agile and DevOps practices, and this is something Red Hat Enterprise Linux could focus on. 

Our organization has been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for quite a few years. Following LCM, we always stay up to date with the current version.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is definitely stable.

It definitely has scalability from an up-and-side perspective.

Customer service and support are very good. We can always rely on them to assist when we run into issues. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

We have multiple operating systems in our landscape, but Red Hat is most likely the leader as an open-source solution. The choice of a solution comes down to fit for purpose. Red Hat Enterprise Linux fits our purpose.

The biggest return on investment is reliable support, as we can always rely on them to assist with any issues.

In terms of total cost of ownership, it is definitely something for which you have to work with the vendor and ensure that you have a cost-effective solution in place.

I work closely with the licensing department in determining licensing costs and requirements. Pricing is something that needs to be worked out with the vendor. The more you have, the less you pay. That is the model nowadays in IT, but it is very cost-effective. You get what you pay for.

When choosing a solution, it is crucial to ensure it is fit for purpose. There is a reason why you pay for support. At the end of the day, it comes down to the support that you get from the vendor.

We do not utilize the containerization part, but definitely, in the future, we will move to a hybrid way of working. Everyone is moving to more of a hybrid cloud solution these days rather than having it only in the cloud or on-prem. Red Hat Enterprise Linux supports working in a hybrid environment. It is definitely an enabler.

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

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for model bases and websites.

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its robust security and reliable support, which are critical for our government healthcare department and require 24/7 operation.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize our development by consolidating all our servers in one location using VMware and deploying a single instance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux across that infrastructure.

It provides stability to our containerized workloads.

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

The built-in security features are great. We have never had a security breach in our Red Hat environment and receive monthly updates.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enhances our system's security by providing monthly updates, including critical security patches, significantly reducing our overall risk.

Itcontributes to our business continuity and compliance efforts through its stability and rapid issue resolution.

We use Red Hat Insights to ensure compliance with any Red Hat product integration.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is helping to reduce our total cost of ownership, and our planned shift to virtualization is expected to further decrease TCO.

Red Hat's support is valuable for our employees who are new to OpenShift.

I'm seeking a streamlined method for migrating from an OpenShift environment to a VMware virtualization platform utilizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The price of Red Hat Enterprise Linux always has room for improvement.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 15 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers scalability as long as licensing compliance is maintained.

The Red Hat technical support is excellent.

Positive

The greatest return on investment from Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the skilled support it provides to our application teams.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expensive, particularly for governments operating with limited budgets.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten. While it is open source, which typically means ongoing improvements, there are still some minor details that could be refined.

When choosing between a third-party Linux OS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, consider the workload. Less critical workloads that don't require 24/7 operation can utilize various third-party options. However, for stable, secure, and mission-critical systems demanding 24/7 uptime, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the optimal choice.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux to maintain our systems, manage our user logs, and monitor our storage.

The fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable has led to more enterprises wanting to use it. All the updates are current from a security point of view. So, the fact that we are one-managed or subscription-managed through Red Hat Enterprise Linux keeps us secure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features simplify risk reduction and help maintain compliance, which gives us peace of mind.

The knowledge base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux depends on the end user. However, the information is always there, and the most reliable information is from the Red Hat system.

We have a dedicated server for provisioning and patching, and I am satisfied with how it works.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's Image Builder and System Roles improve our productivity by increasing efficiency.

The Web Console is helpful because we use it to monitor and record users if we choose to, as well as check our system to make sure everything is up to date and we are current with the latest patches.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us be more compliant.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's ease of use in a controlled system, especially when dealing with constant repository updates, is valuable.

From a monitoring standpoint, we have Splunk, which is more versatile in monitoring data files, and Nagios, which can monitor multiple instances via Windows or Linux servers and different boxes. If Red Hat Enterprise Linux can improve its monitoring capabilities, that would be helpful.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

I have not submitted any support tickets because we can find all the answers we need from the RHEL community for minor issues.

Positive

Red Hat has been the industry standard for most companies, but sometimes, organizations will run a Windows server and Active Directory alongside it.

The critical difference between Red Hat and Windows lies in their user interfaces. While both share a similar underlying structure, Windows offers a graphical interface for easy interaction, while Red Hat relies on command-line prompts. This makes Red Hat a more secure environment.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps improve efficiency, reducing vulnerability and, ultimately, a higher return on investment by minimizing IT costs and downtime.

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

We have between 100 and 200 end users. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is deployed in a standard, dev, quality, staging, and production environment.

Maintenance is minimal for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We only deal with updates and patches.

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 provide consultation to clients for their mission-critical applications. Its primary use case is running containers and microservices on Springboard.

My customers use versions 7.2 or 7.3. I have used versions 8.2 and 8.4. I have tried version 9, but I use version 8.4 specifically because it supports HighPoint RAID for storing the data, whereas the client applications run on the much lower version.

There are benefits in terms of price, security, and stability to reduce the risk of applications going down or something like that. A vast majority of systems are on Red Hat Enterprise Linux than on other distributions, which is another benefit.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps to achieve security standards certification. They use it in the PCI DSS segment, so it enables the applications to be compliant with all these security aspects.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very stable. It has been in the market for many years, and it is used by large organizations.

Their documentation and knowledge base are valuable. As an individual developer, whenever I have problems, it is easy to find the information. Their knowledge base is seamlessly integrated with the software. Whenever I have a question, it directly takes me to the knowledge base. It is well documented.

It supports scripting very well. Everything is scripted. A snapshot is taken in the VM, and the script is applied. It lends itself to better security and governance processes.

Its installation on a RAID or cluster system is something difficult. There are specific teams working on that. The GRUB configuration is also a little different from the other Linux distributions. 

In terms of additional features, as technology keeps evolving, the product will also have to evolve. For example, Microsoft Windows has come a long way. In Windows 11, there are so many features that are fundamentally the same as the oldest version, but there are other aspects or processes that have improved. macOS has also evolved over time. Similarly, in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux that I used in 2003 and the one that I am using now, some things are the same and some things have changed. Red Hat can continue to engage clients, understand the use cases, and update them.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2002 or 2003. Red Hat has a vast variety of products. I have only been using Red Hat's operating system. I have not used Red Hat's other products.

It is very stable.

It is scalable, but I do not have experience in building hundreds of systems on a VM.

I have not used their technical support at all. I only use their documentation portal for self-support. Our production support team interacts with Red Hat's support team.

As a developer, I use both SUSE as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. My personal preference is Gentoo, but no one runs Gentoo on a production system. Gentoo is better in terms of customization. You can choose what you want.

I am not directly involved in its deployment, but I am planning to build an application. At that time, I will be deploying it myself. In the organization where I work as a consultant, there is a segregation of roles. There is a production support team, there is a development team, and there is a DevOps team. I am a part of the development team.

Its initial setup is straightforward. It is not complex. It also depends on the architecture, high availability, etc.

In terms of deployment, earlier, it was on-prem, but now, it is on the cloud. My client runs about 150 VMs on the cloud in the production, staging, and QA environments. Most of the things have been consolidated into VMs. The migration is complete. It was not that complex.

I have not measured that, but it should pay back for itself easily. The ROI should be reasonable. The cost over a period of time should be minuscule. As compared to other OSs, it is better to go with a big, known, and trusted vendor.

As a developer, I pay around 10,000 Yen, which is around $100 per annum for support. SUSE and Red Hat are typically the same without standard support. The pricing is not a big deal. Enterprise customers will pay for the support. Enterprises have the money for one or two products like this that are reliable and supported.

As a consultant, I advise customers to go for support. You mitigate risks by having support. For your personal usage, you can manage without support, but when it comes to the enterprise level, you need to delegate things to people, and it should be through the proper channel. You need a proper point of contact.

I would advise following the best practices recommended by Red Hat. It will minimize the downtime of the application or system. Partner with the vendor and get that support. Know the business case and build a strong relationship with the vendor. Trust them and tell them your use case, and they will come up with the best solution possible.

I am not a big authority on Red Hat or other Linux or Unix products. Only recently, I have been exposed to the concept called hardening and penetration testing. I do not know whether Red Hat provides a hardened version of the OS. My basic distribution is Gentoo which provides a hardened version of Linux. On the client side, the organizations we work with have different departments, such as the security department and the compliance department. For security, they work with various options that are available. For penetration testing, we engage a penetration testing consultancy company once a year.

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

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an infrastructure support operating system across both x86 and s390 platforms. Specifically, we are running it on x86 Intel and Linux s390 mainframe on Zynq.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a stable operating system. We recently upgraded the majority of our systems from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. We were able to automate most of the upgrade process and did not encounter any major issues. As a result, we were able to bring our systems up to date quickly and easily. This is a major advantage of using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

From an automation standpoint, we have been able to automate some of our patching workflows. This has definitely saved us time and money.

From a security and compliance standpoint, it is easy to maintain compliance. This is mostly accomplished by patching Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a frequent basis. The availability of security patches is also quick, which allows us to keep up with our client requirements quickly. Red Hat usually does a good job of making fixes available in a timely fashion, so we can remediate high-priority issues when they arise.

From a containerization standpoint, Docker and Podman now give us the ability to move workloads and structures around with little effort. It is very flexible and consistent, and the results also provide us with a stepping stone as we move towards an orchestration platform like OpenShift. Our ability to run Podman on servers and then migrate those Podman deployments to OpenShift is very beneficial.

The most valuable features are ease of support and the ability to run a read-only course on the operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easy to maintain. We currently use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with Docker for containerization. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we are moving to Podman, which is a native container runtime that is part of the operating system. 

I suggest that Red Hat move to a continuous delivery model instead of major releases. I know that this is a trend for many middleware products. We do not have a major release network. We only have monthly or quarterly roll-on releases on our continuous delivery model, which reduces the impact of a major version. This would probably be the easiest change to make.

The technical support has room for improvement.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

Since we run a number of hypervisors for all of our real systems, I believe that a lot of the scalability comes from a level higher than the operating system. However, Red Hat Enterprise Linux can accommodate these tools.

Red Hat support could be improved, and they should have a better relationship with IBM and VMware. This is because a lot of what we do involves working with IBM, both from a hardware standpoint and from a hypervisor standpoint. We have a long history with IBM, and we are now starting to work more with Red Hat on OpenShift private cloud solutions and other tooling. However, Red Hat and IBM are not on the same page. They are still very different companies, and they don't always know what the other one is doing. This can lead to contradictory information, inaccurate information, and frustration for customers. I think there is a relationship between Red Hat and IBM that could be improved. If Red Hat and IBM could work together more effectively, it would put customers at ease and make them more confident that they could get the work done. It would also help IBM and Red Hat to better understand each other's products and services, which would lead to better customer support.

For example, we recently had an incident that started as a severity two on the scaling. A number of our account representatives called and emailed us, saying, "Hey, we wanted to let you know that you have an open case. We need some help with this." The incident was not a production outage, but it was preventing us from doing something, so there was an indirect production impact. After about ninety minutes of back-and-forth communication, we were told, "Okay, go ahead and bump it up to severity one. That should get traction." We did not hear from anyone for four hours. This does not happen every time, but in this case, it needed to be dealt with well before four hours. It made things more difficult than they needed to be. Sometimes the support is an eight out of ten, and sometimes it is a four.

The end result was still good because they acknowledged what happened and got everyone together to resolve it but it was not done in an efficient way.

Neutral

The initial setup of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very straightforward. It is not much different from any other Linux operating system. Most of the things we need to consider when deploying Linux are relatively standard. Therefore, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easy to deploy and maintain. If we know how to administer Linux operationally, then Red Hat Enterprise Linux should be easy to deploy.

I do not know enough to give a comprehensive answer, but other operating systems are in use at my company because they have more favorable licensing terms. This is a major factor in why we do not use Red Hat Enterprise Linux everywhere.

We evaluated SUSE Linux Enterprise and a few others. Depending on the computing platform, it is sometimes better and sometimes not. For some of our environments that are running on s390, SUSE Linux Enterprise gives us a better price point. However, for some of our other environments, such as x86 on VMware, it is more valuable. It is a better financial move for us in those cases. Therefore, the value of SUSE Linux Enterprise changes depending on the computing architecture.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.

We have a requirement to have a Linux operating system.

I'm not sure how our developers are building their images. I believe they use some desk start products.

We use SUSE Linux Enterprise for Linux on the mainframe. In a particular enclave, we have some government contracts where we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a number of reasons, including licensing for hosts. These hosts are hosted with OpenShift. We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for all our Bastion hosts and OLS for our other hosts.

The Red Hat knowledge base is generally an eight or nine out of ten, but it can be difficult to get the information we need. The initial level of support is a six or seven, but it improves as we escalate the issue.

I am a Federal Contractor. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is one of the FedRAMP-approved operating systems, so the government is comfortable with using it. That is why we use it, even though it is a bit outdated. Most of our software runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux because we work in Identity Access Management. For example, Oracle Identity Stack runs on Linux, so we have to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We follow very strict security protocols, and we use Ansible to enforce them. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the easiest way for us to do this.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a trustworthy and highly scalable operating system. The federal government needs an operating system that they can rely on, with enterprise support and long-term service. As well as being stable and well-known within the community.

I have not yet experienced a disaster recovery scenario, but resiliency is important, and risk is very reliable. The auto logs are very clear. Additionally, with those support communities, it is straightforward enough to understand what we are looking for and to eventually resolve the issue.

I actually like the in-place upgrade that Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers. It has made our upgrade process from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 much easier than we originally thought. 

I know that many people prefer in-house support, but I personally prefer Red Hat's support. It is easy to get in contact with their support team.

Even though it is not directly related, the fact that Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Ansible are closely related makes it easier for us to move forward.

The package management, repository, and satellite repository are easy to use.

I am a bit biased because my client is air-gapped. This means that we cannot connect to the internet, so all of our operations are disconnected. I would like to see better support for disconnected operations. For example, the in-place upgrade from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 initially relies on a lot of online resources. This makes sense, but it would be nice for a consumer or integrator like me to be able to say, "Hey, we need an offline solution so we can upgrade our government clients on-premises." Red Hat does provide instructions on how to create a repository, but the instructions are not very clear. This leaves us scrambling to figure out why we are missing a repository in our satellite image. Red Hat should provide a way to mirror repositories or at least provide a solution for us to bubble up packages throughout the entire process.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for four years. We started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, and we upgraded to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 in an airgap environment. We are currently in the process of upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scalable. It is deployed in a 10,000-plus enterprise company.

The support team is always direct and easy to find. Their answers are so helpful that I have not yet had to call them. I also appreciate how they approach troubleshooting. They don't assume that you're doing anything wrong. Instead, they try to educate you on how to fix the problem. In my experience, the support team has always been very positive.

Positive

I have experience with most Linux operating systems, including distributions like Apache, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, and others. From my perspective, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not necessarily the top standout product, but I know that it is a product that I can rely on. It is the standard image that enterprise users in the community will use. We can rely to a degree on the standardization of how packets are used to support it. However, it does not stand out to us as much as the other products. Nevertheless, I know that it will have a positive partnership with us. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a more suitable operating system for enterprise environments in terms of stability and reliability.

We are currently in the process of reviewing our initial solution for upgrading from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. The in-place upgrade for the airgap environment is an area where we are still struggling to understand the documentation. However, Red Hat has been very supportive and has offered us pathways to move forward. We do not have much to say at this time, as we are still in the middle of the process.

When we upgraded Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, it took us around six months due to external factors not related to Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Our client has a direct subscription to Red Hat.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten. I am not a firm believer that everything is perfect right out of the gate. Everything can be improved. I am a little biased. I wish there was better support for offline environments. I understand that I am in the minority in this case, as everyone is connected to the internet now. However, as a federal contractor and integrator, we have requirements that we must meet. It is not fun having to download binaries offline and then figure out how to set up our own repository. These are not straightforward tasks like Red Hat telling me what to do. We just wish it was easier to do things like patch management. Perhaps there could be more support for air gap environments. These are not environments where we can temporarily connect to the internet. They have never seen the internet.

Depending on our customer's environment, sometimes they have GovCloud, but we still use Red Hat Enterprise Linux images there. Sometimes the customer can't use that so we use the offering from CentOS. But we still try to match it with CentOS.

The reason why some clients don't use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud is not because of security concerns. I think it's more about cost and their current contract situation. They need a low-cost, open source alternative, and our recommendation would be CentOS. However, many clients are not ready to pay for the enterprise edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so they may choose to scale back their plans.

I have not used the Red Hat Enterprise Linux knowledge base strictly. I have only used the Red Hat Enterprise Linux support.

Clients who use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud, typically use AWS GovCloud. As a government integrator, we strive to design our solutions in a way that does not lock our clients into any specific cloud provider. This is why we chose Linux, as it can be run on any cloud platform. This flexibility is important to our clients from a price contract perspective. For example, Amazon provides Kubernetes services, among other things. We try to figure out open source solutions or at least architecturally determine them and provide them to our clients. For example, we can tell them that they can move all of their GovCloud data to Azure or Google Cloud. Government agencies really like Amazon right now because it is FedRAMP. However, for other classes that are not government or commercial, we try to introduce them to the CentOS perspective so that they can get a taste of the upstream.

We do not use the image builder tool provided by Red Hat. Instead, we use the one provided by Amazon. We take a base image, coordinate it with Ansible, and provide it to any environments that have used the cloud. For on-premises solutions, we strictly use manual processes.

I don't have a perspective on the golden image, which is at least with our client. The parts that we use are always evolving, so we don't really maintain the golden image. We do have a relative backup of what we deployed to, but we don't necessarily have a strict golden image.

Migrating workloads between the cloud and the data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not entirely applicable to us. We did migrate from on-premises to the cloud at one point, but migrating from Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premises to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud was not a concern for us. We knew it would be stable and fine. The main concern was migrating our customer data from our enterprise to the cloud.

If someone is looking for an open source cloud-based operating system for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would like to eventually drive them over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but I would recommend starting with CentOS. CentOS is a good gateway OS because it is very similar to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and the knowledge transfer between the two is very straightforward. This makes it a good choice for users who are new to Linux, or who are looking for an OS that is compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I use it as an EC2 Web Server.

It was needed for FedRAMP Moderate compliance.

The ready-to-go AMI is a valuable feature.

It does not pass the RHEL8 STIG standards without a lot of extra work.

I have used the solution for one year.

I previously used CIS RHEL 8 Level 2.

Check it to verify costs.

I did not consider any alternate solutions.

It does not pass the RHEL8 STIG standards without a lot of extra work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

We never faced any major issues.

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

Neutral

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

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

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