Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We are running standard workloads such as Spring Boot, Node.js, React platforms, and Liferay on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our workloads primarily due to its strong support system and the extensive open-source community surrounding it, making it a widely known and utilized operating system globally.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize our development using the OpenShift platform, where our developers utilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers for software runtimes.

It provides support, version updates, and security features that assist our containerization projects.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has performed well in our critical business operations.

We rely on Red Hat Enterprise Linux for its built-in security features, timely support, and rapid release of the latest patches and updates.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helped reduce risk and improve efficiency by enabling us to achieve more with fewer resources.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has significantly contributed to business continuity and compliance efforts due to its seamless integration with our existing environment.

We are currently deploying our operator in the OpenShift environment, along with advanced cluster security. This automated solution scans Red Hat Enterprise Linux server images and can be customized to meet our needs.

The portfolio helps lower the total cost of ownership for our enterprise landscape due to its robust support system and rapid updates, making it the optimal solution.

Red Hat's support and the latest versions offer significant advantages, including efficient resource utilization with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, allowing us to run more workloads with fewer resources. Furthermore, the seamless integration with our existing systems adds substantial value.

My primary focus on assisting development projects and CI/CD pipelines has been largely issue-free. However, there's room for improvement with some Linux tools.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has consistently delivered strong performance for our business-critical operations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is scalable due to the container environment, which is beneficial as our needs change.

The support from Red Hat is top-tier.

Positive

Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers the greatest return on investment through reduced maintenance requirements and improved employee productivity due to its stability, security, and ease of management.

I have limited information regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux pricing and licensing, but our managers appear satisfied.

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

While some may consider third-party Linux operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers superior robustness, maintenance, and consistent platform upgrades, making it a more reliable choice due to its dedication to providing a consistently updated environment.

Our Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems support specialized voice applications and telecommunications systems, which are integrated into the larger infrastructure.

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for our workloads due to its superior security and the straightforward implementation of security policies compared to other operating systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development, and we are using automation tools like Ansible and Red Hat Satellite Server to streamline the process of building and managing these operating systems.

It offers strong performance capabilities that are suitable for business-critical applications.

There are built-in security features that can be automated. We must gather all the relevant policies and incorporate them into our automation scripts to apply them to the operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has provided zero downtime, which is incredibly reliable for us. It has also contributed to our business continuity and compliance efforts.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has contributed to business continuity and compliance efforts.

Since implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, our penetration test results have significantly improved.

Red Hat's portfolio helps reduce our total cost of ownership across our enterprise landscape.

The most valuable features for us are the flexibility and security that Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides.

We have experienced some issues with the support.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for around five years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has performed very well for our business-critical applications, and we have had no problems related to it.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux scales very nicely for us; it is good, flexible, and provides all we need.

There have been some issues with support, but this might be because of our environments and their air-gap configurations. However, overall, the experience is quite satisfactory.

Positive

We chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux over other Linux distributors because of the security reasons. It's much easier to implement security policies with Red Hat Enterprise Linux compared to other OSs.

The biggest return on investment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the flexibility and security it provides.

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

While we plan to initiate containerization projects on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we are postponing them because some of our legacy systems are not yet compatible.

We are planning to use AI for an upcoming project that will help people find solutions to problems with on-premises systems in environments without internet connectivity. Due to this air-gapped requirement, we must build and test various AI systems within that secure environment. Therefore, we are currently in the initial planning phase of this project.

I would advise choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it fulfills our needs perfectly. Why choose something else?

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Ansible, network monitoring systems, and similar applications.

We implemented Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is widely used in our region and offers excellent support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled partial centralization of our development processes.

It performs well for our business-critical applications and has robust built-in security features.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has contributed to business continuity and compliance efforts.

The built-in security features are quite good.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has ongoing potential for improved integration with hosting solutions and VPNs as the demand for these technologies grows.

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

The support has a good community. It's easy to find almost every resource needed.

Positive

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that it's Linux. I've lived so long with Red Hat Linux, so it has always had a good history.

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

When considering a third-party Linux OS, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a strong option due to its excellent support and robust ecosystem.

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.

One of the valuable features is that it's convenient. 

The rest of its features are really nice.

Red Hat enables us to achieve security standards certification. We have been certified for the PPI certification last year. 

Red Hat has been good when it comes to building with confidence and ensuring availability across our infrastructure. We are really confident about the security process.

It is implemented across multiple physical and virtual infrastructures. We have applied it on most production servers. They are integrated quite well. 

We use the Red Hat system roles feature. We have been using this for automation purposes and to find some tests. 

The response could be better for urgent issues. If there's an issue with live services, they need to be faster. 

It would be nice to have antivirus services.

There should be more upgrades to the security features. 

I've used the solution for a long time. My organization has used it for more than three years. 

The stability is good. I'd rate it eight out of ten. 

The scalability is decent. I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. Different teams and departments, including application and development teams. 

We do not have plans to increase usage in the future.

I'm very happy with the technical support.

Positive

We have got some other open systems like CentOS. We just have most of our production services to ReadyX from CentOS and Oracle. Red Hat is more secure. The support is very nice as well.

I joined the organization after deployment and wasn't involved in the implementation. 

I'm not sure if the solution requires any maintenance. 

I'm not really involved in the pricing or the licensing. However, it may be expensive. We have different licenses. 

We evaluated different options.

I'm a customer and end-user.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. 

We have over a thousand VMs or physical machines running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have various applications, and we also run the OpenShift Container Platform on-prem, so we have a lot of containers. They are migrating a lot of apps from the mainframe over to Spring Boot type of app. It fits well in the container.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux gave us stability. There is somebody to call when we have issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has affected our system's uptime or security.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not yet enabled us to achieve security standards certification because we do not go after any of those. There are some products that we will have to do once we get there, but so far, we have not had to certify anything.

Red Hat Insights gives a lot of insights into known issues that we do not think about unless we call support. It tells us to proactively fix something.

I have used Image Builder and System Roles mainly for Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Edge. It builds out the OS tree build for us, which is very helpful. I do not like to do that myself.

I use the Red Hat console every now and then, but I do not use it heavily. I am old school.

The security updates and the support that comes along with it for applications are valuable.

Red Hat Insights was a nice feature to discover. I did not know about Ansible until probably eight years ago. I learned that language, and that was a void or something that was missing for over 25 years.

I like the SCAP Workbench interface that I can use to build some security around. I use Ansible to go out and do configuration management checks as well. Overall, I feel it is very easy to get the data I need.

We finally started doing Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Edge. That one definitely is an improvement. One piece that is missing is that we are required to use moby-engine, but currently, Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Edge forces Podman, so we have to work around it.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a decade in my current organization, but overall, I have been using Red Hat for over 25 years.

Early on, support was closer to a six, but now, it is a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have used them all back from the early nineties. I have used CentOS and others. The reasons for companies switching from those to Red Hat Enterprise Linux are that most of it is open source, and they get more product features. There is a market. If other companies are doing it, they tend to switch over. Containerization is a major reason as well.

I was involved in the OpenShift deployments. We are also directly involved in every version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are involved in the proof of concept. Its deployment is straightforward.

We used Red Hat with the OpenShift deployments to make sure we were doing it right, and then a lot of other things, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 or Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, we just did ourselves.

In terms of our upgrade and/or migration plans to stay current, we are upgrading everything to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, and we are going to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 already. We are making that a product feature. We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Edge for our remote deployments.

In terms of provisioning and patching, we deploy the base image, and then we use Ansible for the configuration behind it. For Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Edge, we use the OS builders to build out that same image. I use Kickstart to build the base image before the configuration.

I do not track that in the company, but I am sure we have seen an ROI.

It seems to be fair. It is not overpriced. I went to the simple model, and that makes it easier for us to deploy.

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