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reviewer2399127 - PeerSpot reviewer
Platform Engineer at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Jun 10, 2024
Top-tier support, 100% stable, and helpful for doing more in less time
Pros and Cons
  • "I like the stability that comes with Red Hat. That has always been the feature that I like."
  • "They can allow more access to their training and their products' testing. There are ways to do it now. You might have to get a certain type of account to test their products. It might be easier if you can just download the product and test it out."

What is our primary use case?

We are mostly using it for application servers, infrastructure servers, and database servers.

How has it helped my organization?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux lends itself to a lot of automation. We are able to manage many more servers with less staff and by using other Red Hat products such as Ansible. Those are the things that I like.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. Their Podman product has made it easier. It comes with a lot of security. It is a drop-in product or replacement for Docker. I have used Docker before and switching to Podman was very easy. I just saw the demo for the Podman desktop, and I am looking forward to using that. It will hopefully help me streamline container usage and container deployment in Kubernetes or OpenShift.

It inherently has a lot of functions built in for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance. For example, it has SELinux, certain firewalls, logging, and all those things. It has all the built-in features required to meet the needs. We can plug in other third-party tools to have it gather information, or we can send logs to centralized locations to track activity and do audits and things like that.

I use Red Hat Insights for different things. I do not use it much to look at security risks. I know that it has those features, but I use a different tool like a Satellite server to take care of patching and things like that. Red Hat Insights provides us with vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance, but it has not affected our uptime much. It is good to see that information. I can see those vulnerabilities, and I can see action steps or remediation steps that I can take. All my servers are patched on a cycle, so as the cycle goes through, each server gets patched based on its own cycle. It does not really affect the uptime.

What is most valuable?

I like the stability that comes with Red Hat. That has always been the feature that I like. They do not always have the newest features, but they prioritize stability, which is important in the production environment.

What needs improvement?

Red Hat should keep doing what they have always done. They should continue to be a leader in the open-source space. They should keep innovating and keep creating great products. They can allow more access to their training and their products' testing. There are ways to do it now. You might have to get a certain type of account to test their products. It might be easier if you can just download the product and test it out.

Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
June 2026
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.

For how long have I used the solution?

In a production environment, I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for about five years. I have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux clones such as Fedora and CentOS for about 15 years or maybe longer.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is absolutely stable. It is 100% stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It is good. It scales well. With the tools that Red Hat provides, it does not matter if you have 10 servers, 100 servers, or 1,000 servers. They make it simpler with Ansible. Ansible is your friend.

How are customer service and support?

They are top-tier. Support is probably their number one selling point. As long as you give the Red Hat engineers what they need, they are very good at providing new solutions. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have used Red Hat clones in other positions. I might as well just say it is Red Hat because it is a clone, so I have been using Red Hat all along if we look at different products.

I have worked with CentOS, Rocky Linux, etc. The main difference is that Red Hat's support is top-tier. There is also stability. With the ecosystem that they have built, there are a lot of tools to help me manage. They have Ansible and other great tools to help manage the product. You cannot say the same about Windows. They might have a different way of doing things.

How was the initial setup?

We have deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premises. We have a hybrid cloud environment, but we run other types of servers there. They are mostly Windows, and they are run on Azure cloud. We do not run Red Hat Enterprise Linux in a hybrid cloud environment, but there is always an opportunity to do that in the future.

The Red Hat servers that we have are on-prem. We use VMware and the tools that they provide to deploy Red Hat.

Its initial deployment was done a long time ago. It is a straightforward process to install it as long as you are not trying to do anything complicated.

We do not have a deployment strategy. We install it based on the requirements. If it is a web server or database server, there are different things that you need to do, but it is pretty straightforward. It is a good process.

What about the implementation team?

We took help for deploying Red Hat and purchasing the license and maybe the hardware. We probably used CDW and Advizex. They are probably based in Pittsburgh.

What was our ROI?

Time savings is the biggest return on investment. I can do more in less or a shorter amount of time. The time savings depend on what you are working on, but you can potentially have about 75% time savings.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I have very little experience with pricing and getting quotes. The whole VMware thing happened, and everybody is looking at different alternatives. At this point, any competitor is probably a good choice based on the cost.

What other advice do I have?

Everyone should evaluate what their needs are, test out different products, and pick the product that is best for their needs. I know that the Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a very good solid product. One thing I would say is that their support is top-tier, so from that aspect, I would recommend Red Hat.

At this time, I am trying to develop a platform that facilitates developer workflows. We may adopt more of a GitHub mindset and use Red Hat tools, such as OpenShift and Ansible.

We are currently not using containers as much as we would like to. We are working on setting standards. That is going to come down the road. Our workloads right now are mostly virtual machines and monolithic applications built on VMs. We will use them more. We will make more microservices and use pods to contain the applications. We will use more Red Hat tools.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten. There are many things to take into account. From a production perspective, it is a ten out of ten. From the innovation and latest features perspective, it is probably a seven. That is not necessarily a bad thing because that is their unique point. They prioritize stability, but if you want something with your features, you can use Fedora.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
reviewer2399706 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Operations Engineer III at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
May 28, 2024
We have a reliable OS for production, and I can't speak highly enough of their support and community
Pros and Cons
  • "Their support is valuable. Whenever I had a problem, I could get on a phone call with somebody. I did not have to go to some random forum or send an email and wait forever. I could call somebody."
  • "It does have a workstation option, but you rarely hear anything about it. I would love to see the workstation replace Windows. That is a stretch goal, but it is possible."

What is our primary use case?

The use case in my very early years was for dedicated servers for doing web applications.

How has it helped my organization?

We almost exclusively use Red Hat. The benefits boil down to the support. There is no problem getting support. Whenever we have an issue that we cannot solve, which does not happen often, we have somebody who is there either virtually or physically.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-prem and on the cloud in a hybrid environment. We probably also have edge devices. I am not completely sure about that one. Having it in a hybrid cloud deployment has been no different than having it on-prem. Running it on-prem is just as good as running it on the cloud for us. It simply works.

I appreciate the dashboards that are available online. There has been a lot of feedback on the CVEs. The most recent one that came was probably related to Zutil. Red Hat made an announcement very quickly saying that if you are using only Red Hat features, you do not have to worry about it. It does not run on their operating system. Unless you are custom compiling, it does not work on their system. I greatly appreciate little things like that because they save us a lot of time. If Red Hat is simply saying that it is not a part of their repo, I do not have to look for it.

We use Red Hat Insights but not company-wide. It is one of those things that simply saves you time. I do not want to have myself or anyone on my team go out and check various things. That is the whole purpose of using Red Hat Satellite. The whole purpose of all different dashboards and these websites is to use what you have. Let it report out what you have and not continue to write scripts just to check things.

What is most valuable?

Their support is valuable. Whenever I had a problem, I could get on a phone call with somebody. I did not have to go to some random forum or send an email and wait forever. I could call somebody.

What needs improvement?

It does have a workstation option, but you rarely hear anything about it. I would love to see the workstation replace Windows. That is a stretch goal, but it is possible.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since version 4. It has been a while.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It is stable as long as you do not do something stupid.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Red Hat specifically works hard to make it difficult to not be able to scale it into anything. The only thing that I do not see it being capable of, officially at least, are the IoT devices. Technically, it is possible to get it on those devices, but that is not something Red Hat is focusing on right now. From a scalability standpoint, it comes down to what makes a reasonable profit and what is a good return on investment while choosing how to scale and where to scale. Red Hat is doing it right so far.

How are customer service and support?

Prior to a few months ago, the support that we got from a TAM point of view was next to none. Now that I understand the scenario a little bit more, it was not because Red Hat was not doing its job or did not want to do more support. It was because of how the contracts aligned, and more importantly, who in our organization was handling those contracts. We had a recent change in our organization in terms of who is running what and who is handling what. When that change happened, the doors really burst open. Now that we have a different person he is working with, we are getting incredible support from our TAM. He is in communication with us on a very regular basis. While I have been here at Red Hat Summit, we have gone out to have meetings twice. I cannot speak highly enough. I would rate their support a ten out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

My current organization has pretty much always used Red Hat, specifically Red Hat Enterprise Linux. There are all sorts of flavors of Unix in our environment. Almost all of them are there because they are managed network devices.

We wanted to stay close to Red Hat Enterprise Linux simply because of the mentality of the business. We have got some people who have been around for 20 years. Things such as switching from YUM update to APT update are easy. People can usually change from one to another pretty quickly, but some of the other commands that you are used to running in Red Hat Enterprise Linux are slightly different for different versions of Unix. It did not make sense.

I have used a lot of different variants through the years. I could be running Raspberry Pi, or I could be using Ubuntu to do a job but not for the production environment. I do not waste my time anymore. I know what works and where support is.

How was the initial setup?

Our setup is a bit of a hybrid. We are streamlining a lot of things and trying to redesign how we are doing things. In terms of the cloud, we are 100% TerraForm. We are building out infrastructure as a code and TerraForm pipelines. On-prem, we have a Jenkins job that runs some TerraForm, which then runs some Ansible and then some Puppet. There is some cleaning up needed there.

Currently, we use all three major cloud providers: Azure, Google Cloud, and AWS. Each has its purpose.

The initial experience of deploying it at the current company was terrible, but it was not a Red Hat issue. It was an internalized issue that took a little bit of time to work out. After that, it was not a problem.

What about the implementation team?

We implement it on our own.

What was our ROI?

I have not run into a single person who knows about Red Hat Enterprise Linux and is not being helpful. You can get talking with somebody at Red Hat Summit about what you are doing on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and they will be like, "I did that a couple of days ago. Did you run into this problem too?" There is a community. I am sure there are communities for other variants, but my return on investment is simply community and support. I cannot speak highly enough of these two.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would say, "Good Luck!" We looked at a lot of different options to potentially leave Red Hat simply because of the cost. We tried out CentOS. We tried out Rocky. There were even talks about trying out Ubuntu, but there was the hassle of changing all of our mentality and code to work with different systems. It just did not make sense. CentOS worked almost side by side with Red Hat, but certain things that we have specialized with Red Hat were not working on CentOS for some reason.

We chose not to use CentOS because we had a misunderstanding of what AppStream was in terms of end-of-life for CentOS. Rocky was ruled out pretty quickly simply because of a lack of understanding in terms of:

  • Where does Rocky come from?
  • How reliable is it?
  • Where is the support?

Red Hat's support model trumps a lot of those other ideas. I tell people that even if they are working in a home lab environment, get a developer license and get a developer account with Red Hat. Use Red Hat because more and more businesses I work with simply use Red Hat. It is great to have Fedora on your laptop as a workstation. It is great to have CentOS as a workstation. That is because those are still a part of Red Hat. You can transition and use Red Hat for a company. I have not been a fan of Ubuntu and some of the other variants because of how easy it is for people to make changes to operating systems that are not fully backed or tested. In my opinion, you do not want to put production on it.

What other advice do I have?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not enabled us to centralize development. We are moving towards centralized development, but there are still so many different teams, so centralized development is not yet there.

We are partially using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. Within the next year, I hope to bring OpenShift in and replace AKS. I do not have a use case for the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Based on what I have seen here at Red Hat Summit, I have a lot of ideas spinning around in my head to make it happen, but I do not yet have anything around containerization.

Red Hat Insights provides vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance, but we are currently not using that side of it. It helps in my limited sandbox environment, but of course, my sandbox is built up and torn down like crazy. It is valuable, but we do not have a great use case yet.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten. I have been working with Unix systems for a while now. The first Unix system I touched was in 1992. There were so many variants that were striving to become well-known. You would hear all of these weird names. There were all of these weird animals and all of these different logos through the years. Even before 1992, there were a lot. As things progressed, you quickly saw different ones die out. I do not remember when I truly got onboarded with Red Hat. I know I started with version 4. It is one of those companies when you are looking for a name that sticks around and about which you do not have to question if they are going to be around for a while. You do not have to question that with Red Hat. You do not have to question that with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, whereas a lot of other variants do not even exist anymore, or they exist, but they have not been maintained longer than some people have been alive.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)
June 2026
Learn what your peers think about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: June 2026.
902,270 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer2298846 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Architect at a hospitality company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Nov 5, 2023
Enables users to roll out applications easily and provides excellent technical support
Pros and Cons
  • "It is compatible with most Java microservices applications."
  • "The vendor keeps rolling out many packets, which complicates our job."

What is our primary use case?

We have a lot of Oracle databases, Tomcat, and Java microservices running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

How has it helped my organization?

A lot of our applications are like Java microservices. Deploying them on a Unix platform is so much easier. It's open-sourced and provides a lot of compatibility. It makes it easier for us to roll out applications. It is compatible with most Java microservices applications.

What is most valuable?

We like that Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a vendor-supported product. When we have problems, we just call Red Hat Enterprise Linux for support. The product employs a lot of automation tools to manage its OS. We love using Red Hat Satellite. We have close to 5000 servers. Managing individual servers would be a nightmare.

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat Satellite help us automate our repetitive tasks. Every flavor of Linux distribution has its own specialties. The product offers a lot of integration within the Red Hat products suite. We use Red Hat products mostly, so it works for us.

What needs improvement?

The vendor keeps rolling out many packets, which complicates our job. We keep patching our servers. CVEs come out all the time. However, having a solid and secure OS will make our life much easier.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since 2004.

How are customer service and support?

I never had any problem with support. I didn't have any issues that I did not get a resolution for. Sometimes, it takes a little bit of time, but eventually, it gets resolved.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I was using AIX, which is also an IBM product. IBM bought Red Hat Enterprise Linux. AIX was more expensive and required IBM System p. Moving to Red Hat Enterprise Linux was much easier because it is a lot more compatible with the regular hardware like HP and Dell that we buy on the market.

What was our ROI?

I have seen an improvement in our deployment. When we have applications running on Windows, it takes longer to get them set up and provisioned, and the security is different compared to Red Hat.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing could be better. The tool is getting expensive. Before, we could license only the hypervisor where Red Hat Enterprise Linux is running. Now, if a customer has a 12-node hypervisor, Red Hat Enterprise Linux forces customers to license all 12, even though they use only six.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated SUSE. At that time, SUSE did not have good support. We needed good support worldwide.

What other advice do I have?

We use AWS and Microsoft Azure as our cloud providers. We don't use the off-the-shelf product that we get from the cloud. We build around it because we have a standard template. When we deploy our solution in the cloud, all the security features we need are already within the OS, as opposed to using the cloud OS and applying all the changes we need. It's easier to get our template to the cloud and use it.

The licensing for the cloud environment is totally different than the on-premise one. We use the Virtual Datacenter license on-premises. I don't see any difference because Red Hat Enterprise Linux still supports it, whether on-premise or on the cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux knows its product. Whenever I have an issue, an engineer gets assigned to me. I can always escalate if needed. We're not using every host that we license. We ensure that we can fail over smoothly on every single hypervisor. It's fair to license them. We're not using it, but we're still paying for it. I do not like it, but it is a business cost.

We migrate workloads to the cloud. I never upgrade an OS. I usually replace the old OS with a new OS and migrate the application. I use the OS versions 7, 8, and 9. The migration is pretty straightforward. AWS and Azure have a tool that we can use to integrate with our environment. It's a lift and shift. We grab the VM from our on-premise hypervisors and move it to the cloud.

We use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform mostly for patching and upgrading to the next revisions. We don't upgrade from one OS to another. We build on a new OS and get all the applications running there. Once the application is running, we move all the workload from the old OS to the new OS. There's no impact on the existing system.

I don't do the day-to-day patching because we have a managed service. However, it does create interruption. When we do a patch, we have to reboot, especially when there's a kernel update. It causes an outage. I have used Red Hat Insights. It gives us insight into what's happening on every single Red Hat VM that we have. It tells us if it's behind or has some performance bottlenecks. It gives us visibility on the health of the whole OS.

People who are looking into the product must get a good account manager. We must have a good account manager who we can always contact and who gives us all the updates that we need. They keep us in the loop on what is happening in the Red Hat world. We are satisfied with the product.

Overall, I rate the tool a ten out of ten.

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Steven Crain - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Cloud Security at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Nov 3, 2023
Has secure defaults and nice integrations for security and vulnerability scanning
Pros and Cons
  • "There are some nice integrations with scanning for vulnerabilities. That is the feature I have enjoyed the most because I am a security person, and that is my bread and butter."
  • "The only issue we have had with it is around the SELinux configuration because the way Ansible installs, it sticks the platform passwords in a flat file. We want that locked down more strongly than what is there currently with SELinux."

What is our primary use case?

We have Ansible deployed on our Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. We use it to manage the security of our fleet of Ubuntu virtual machines.

How has it helped my organization?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is way ahead of Ubuntu in terms of security and compliance. It is mainly the ecosystem of data science tools that our developers want that pushes us in that direction. As a security engineer, I have a lot more peace at night knowing that my Red Hat servers are doing a good job keeping our Ansible infrastructure safe because that has fingers into everything we do. It is pretty critical.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not affected our system's uptime in any particularly noticeable way.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not enabled us to achieve security standards certification because we do not have any yet. We will have them hopefully in the future.

What is most valuable?

There are some nice integrations with scanning for vulnerabilities. That is the feature I have enjoyed the most because I am a security person, and that is my bread and butter.

Ansible has certainly been a game-changer. It is a lot easier to keep a whole bunch of virtual machines consistent with each other and make a change consistently across all of them. We use them for data science activities. Our data scientists are constantly trying out new packages and downloading new tools. We have to enable them to have root access on their machines but also need to ensure that they are not doing anything stupid at the same time. There are competitors to Ansible, but we are a big Python shop, so it is a very comfortable environment for us.

What needs improvement?

The only issue we have had with it is around the SELinux configuration because the way Ansible installs, it sticks the platform passwords in a flat file. We want that locked down more strongly than what is there currently with SELinux. 

For how long have I used the solution?

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

How are customer service and support?

I would rate their support an eight out of ten.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Primarily, we have used Ubuntu. We have had some of our use cases on CentOS, and then, of course, our workstations are all Windows, but I wish they were not.

We chose Ansible, and that chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux for us.

How was the initial setup?

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud. We have Azure because it is the corporate standard. We do not have any concerns about using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the cloud. Obviously, everything in the cloud is more exposed than everything on-prem, but it has got good, sensible, and secure defaults built in, so there are no concerns there.

In terms of Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades, when we upgraded Ansible this fall, that pushed us from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. It should be a little easier from now on. Now that we have made the big jump from the older Ansible to AAP, we will probably be upgrading the systems on a quarterly basis.

What was our ROI?

We probably have not yet seen an ROI. We purchased it a couple of years ago, but we have not had the time to put it to as much use as we wanted to put it to. The cost is low, so it would not take very long to reach a return on investment.

We have not made use of the Committed Spend.

What other advice do I have?

For its use case, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Richard Geherty - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Director SAP Infrastructure Solution at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Oct 31, 2023
Helped us achieve our security standard certifications
Pros and Cons
  • "We also use Ansible. Ansible is a wonderful tool for automation. We use it to automate our patching. We use Ansible to get playbooks to take care of anything that's manual."
  • "Red Hat Enterprise Linux has affected our HA systems in a negative way. We're working through some of those issues."

How has it helped my organization?

The SAP solution subscriptions have made things a lot easier because it's a standard build. 

The solutions were premium and standard, which were not the same. They've combined those into just one standard version. Only the support hours are different. That is fantastic for us. It makes life easier.

For the standard subscriptions, in the past, updating the OS could increase your downtime. With the production ones, it did not. It got our non-production and production out of sync. Now, they've combined that all into one. It's just the support hours that are different. They're fantastic.

What is most valuable?

We use the SAP solution subscriptions only for SAP, which are great. 

We also use Ansible. Ansible is a wonderful tool for automation. We use it to automate our patching. We use Ansible to get playbooks to take care of anything that's manual.

We were able to achieve our security standard certifications.

What needs improvement?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has affected our HA systems in a negative way. We're working through some of those issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 came up with a new feature that's like a MOM API in our cluster. It goes out into the AWS side and it needs to be adjusted. It does a retry that causes a cluster to failover pretty quickly, so we turned that feature off. That's something that could be improved. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a long time. It has been at least 10 to 15 years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

 

How are customer service and support?

Support has been great. We get the right people for what we need.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

The patching has been good, but we scan with Qualys all the time. It comes up with thousands of EIDs all the time, but putting on the patches seems to resolve that.

We're operating right now from 7.9 to 8.6. We have to go with the supported versions. We did qualify for RHEL 9. 

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We used Unix in the past. We did have to come up with the SAP side. It was always Unix.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Edwin Reyes - PeerSpot reviewer
DevOps at AAA / CSAA
Real User
Oct 26, 2023
Comes with an OpenShift feature
Pros and Cons
  • "The containerized platform will help us use ROSA."
  • "Deployment is simple if you have been using the solution for a long time. However, it can be complex if you are new to it."

What is our primary use case?

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for VMs and physical servers. 

How has it helped my organization?

The containerized platform will help us use ROSA. 

What is most valuable?

The tool's most valuable feature is OpenShift. We plan to move all our applications to microservices. The container platform is integrated into one.

How are customer service and support?

I opened a few cases, and the tool's support responded quickly. 

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

How was the initial setup?

Deployment is simple if you have been using the solution for a long time. However, it can be complex if you are new to it. 

What other advice do I have?

We use RHEL 7 and RHEL 8 on on-premises. RHEL 8 is on the AWS. There is a security policy like CIS when deploying the solution. You can embed it on the image. I am not sure if there is HIPAA compliance yet. 

Migration from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9 is easy. Upgrade depends on the application that is running on each instance. You need to check if it is compatible with the kernel. We need to plan things before migrating to the latest version. We need to stay current to ensure compliance. We plan to move from RHEL 7 to RHEL 9 and use RHEL 8 and RHEL 9. 

We use Red Hat insights but do not utilize them. It helps with the remediation. I use Image Builder to build AWS and GCP images. I haven't deployed them. 

I rate the product a nine out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Hybrid Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
Top 10
Oct 24, 2023
Provides in-depth understanding of infrastructure and has strong community support
Pros and Cons
  • "One pro is that at the operating system layer, like, RHEL has better support from Red Hat, and if something goes down, I found many resources for troubleshooting and stuff online."
  • "There is room for improvement in integration with different cloud platforms."

What is our primary use case?

We predominantly use Red Hat CoreOS we use it to connect to different types of OpenShift clusters.  Whenever I work with RHEL, it's always been with the CLI.

What is most valuable?

Previously, when we were using other distributions, we weren't getting a lot of support for the operating system itself. However, Red Hat has mainly focused on the operating system, so we get more support. 

AWS has its own version of Linux for its instances. All these cloud providers provide more support for the infrastructure and services, but they don't focus on the operating system itself. But Red Hat, with its customer portal, provides better support if something goes down. That's what differentiates RHEL from other products.

One great thing about RHEL is that it has a big community of users. There's a huge community that uses CentOS. If you need some help or have a question online, you get more resources for RHEL compared to other products. 

It's a really good operating system by itself. It's more versatile, integrating with tools like Ansible for automation.

There are amazing resources online, and because we are an enterprise, we have enterprise support. We can always create a support case, and we have some resources to help. The knowledge offered by Red Hat is great.

Another feature I tried was RedHat Insights because they offer it for other RedHat products as well. I've used it for OpenShift. It was helpful. It provides a good, in-depth understanding of what's going on in the actual infrastructure. It gave us good insights into the level at which we can run the containers and if you can scale the infrastructure vertically or horizontally and how to manage it better.

What needs improvement?

There is room for improvement in integration with different cloud platforms. There should be better integration because right now, a lot of cloud platforms have their own versions of Linux, which runs better on them, and they have better integration with the services. RHEL is great, but RHEL is more of a generic form of what Red Hat provides.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using RHEL for about four years now.

How are customer service and support?

There were certain times when I encountered issues. There are certain problems with integrations. 

For example, we had an issue once where the operating system had issues accessing the data server on our VMware infrastructure. So we did have a couple of engineers help us out with that, but that's one area where it can improve. But that's nitpicking. 

It's been great so far, but that's one thing I would like to see that would make RHEL a little better product.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We prominently use RHEL, but we've also used Ubuntu. We also have used PCF. I use Ubuntu Xenial and have worked with Amazon Linux for a while.

One pro is that at the operating system layer, RHEL has better support from Red Hat, and if something goes down, I found many resources for troubleshooting online.

For example, we predominantly use Amazon Linux if I'm using AWS. There aren't a lot of resources if I run into an issue. RHEL has way more documentation on Linux. It has a bigger community, from an operating system perspective.

What about the implementation team?

One of our deployment models is on-premise, and the other is on the cloud. It's a hybrid. We have a big footprint on the cloud.

We use Azure because a lot of resources are already deployed on it. We can use all the features I build on RHEL, but you can scale up the infrastructure, depending on the demand. That's the reason why we use Azure.

For the upgrade process, we mainly use Ansible automation. Whenever we want an upgrade, we just go into the Ansible Tower, change the version, and make sure we are applying that to the right environments so that there's no outage. 

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Microsoft Azure
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Ahmed-Yehia - PeerSpot reviewer
Tech lead at Linux Plus Information Systems
Reseller
Top 5Leaderboard
Jun 20, 2023
Simplifies risk reduction and compliance maintenance by utilizing bash scripts or Ansible to automate and streamline our tasks
Pros and Cons
  • "Errata is the most valuable feature, which is supported by Red Hat."
  • "Red Hat Enterprise Linux's ability to run containerized applications is not optimized and has room for improvement."

What is our primary use case?

The users utilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux for building, installing, and automating platforms. Additionally, we employ it as an installer for OpenShift clusters. Furthermore, there is a product called Red Hat High Availability Clustering and also JBoss. Occasionally, we also use it to build an Oracle RAC database.  

How has it helped my organization?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux simplifies risk reduction and compliance maintenance by utilizing bash scripts or Ansible to automate and streamline our tasks. Red Hat also offers a tool called Convert2RHEL, which simplifies the process of maintaining our products from Oracle, CentOS, and other vendors to Red Hat. This feature is truly remarkable.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is perfect for keeping our organization agile, especially when considering rootless containers or utilizing BotMan containers for enhanced security and performance. 

The Red Hat ecosystem enables the seamless integration of our products such as Ansible, Red Hat Virtualization, Red Hat Satellite, and OpenShift platform to fulfill tasks, thereby enhancing the efficiency of our organization.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps us reduce the time we spend on tedious tasks, and the large Red Hat community provides an easy way for us to maintain or fix errors and bugs. We were able to realize the benefits quickly.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables us to achieve security standard certification. I am a certified Red Hat System Administrator and Red Hat Engineer. The content of the certificate includes topics such as C Linux. This helps to make our organization more secure and stable and has an impact on our personnel sourcing.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux assists us in building with confidence and ensures availability across physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructure. While there is a higher level of risk associated with using a public cloud for any product, private or virtualized environments offer greater security.

Red Hat Insights helps us prevent emergencies caused by security issues, noncompliant settings, and unpatched systems by enabling us to be more proactive in detecting and avoiding errors before they occur.

Red Hat Insights provides us with vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance, especially when we register our host directly with Red Hat. It works perfectly because it utilizes machine learning, allowing us to monitor our logs and prevent unnecessary downtime.

What is most valuable?

Errata is the most valuable feature, which is supported by Red Hat. Errata is a list of corrected errors appended to a document in Red Hat, used for provisioning or batching our hosts. Moreover, its stability and security are noteworthy.

What needs improvement?

Ever since Red Hat acquired CentOS, the connection between the new CentOS Upstream and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has become unstable and requires improvement.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's ability to run containerized applications is not optimized and has room for improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extremely stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux can scale horizontally because it is in a virtualized environment. Vertical scaling depends on the deployment of the solution.

We have plans to increase our utilization of the solution.

How are customer service and support?

The Red Hat technical support is excellent; critical issues are resolved promptly.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We also utilize other Linux operating systems depending on the use case. SUSE Linux Enterprise is more optimized for SAP products. When working with an Oracle database, it is preferable to use Oracle Linux.

How was the initial setup?

The initial deployment was straightforward. The deployment time depends on two factors: the first factor is the infrastructure specs, and the second factor is what we are deploying with the operating system. For a minimal server, deployment takes five minutes. For a server with a graphical user interface, it can take up to 20 minutes.

What about the implementation team?

The implementations are all completed in-house.

What other advice do I have?

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is deployed in multiple environments, including pre-production, user acceptance testing, and system integration testing. Our Red Hat team, the development team, and another team utilize Red Hat Enterprise Linux within our organization.

Each processor architecture has a distinct version of the software.

The Red Hat exams are not solely based on security but also on performance. It is a challenging skill to grasp, but once learned, Red Hat Enterprise Linux will be flawless.

I highly recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux, particularly for production environments, due to its stability and enhanced security features.

The most valuable lesson I have learned using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is that the entire Red Hat ecosystem is perfect. All the open-source projects can work together, especially for DevOps or when implementing valid automation or containerized applications. If we need to deploy a centralized application, we will use OpenShift. And if we want to perform tasks on OpenShift, we will use Ansible as an automation platform. If we want to upgrade or manage our environment hosts in batches, we will use Red Hat Satellite. If we have applications and want to create an environment for them, we will use Red Hat JBoss. If we want to run high-availability clusters or high-performance computing clusters, we will turn to Red Hat High Availability Clustering. Working within the Red Hat ecosystem is perfect.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Partner
PeerSpot user
Mark Kvasnicka - PeerSpot reviewer
Test Engineer at Trenton Systems
Real User
Jun 7, 2023
A stable and secure solution that reduces risk and maintains compliance
Pros and Cons
  • "The solution’s security feature is the most valuable feature for my company."
  • "The product should be made more accessible to someone who isn't experienced with Linux."

What is our primary use case?

We're using the product to test operating system stability and verify that it runs on the hardware that Trenton Systems produces. If it passes testing, it becomes a validated operating system that we can sell for the server. We plan to offer Red Hat in the coming months to anyone purchasing systems from our company.

What is most valuable?

The solution’s security feature is the most valuable feature for my company. We offer OS to military or government agencies. For these sectors, security becomes one of the highest priorities, especially the ability to wipe everything out if anything becomes compromised. Red Hat does a great job at that.

What needs improvement?

The product should be made more accessible to someone who isn't experienced with Linux.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using the solution for four to five months.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is very stable. Compared to many other OSs we test for our company, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not crashed out on me or given me any problems. Anytime something goes wrong, after some research, I find that it's going wrong because I'm doing it wrong, not because the OS is fighting me in any way.

How are customer service and support?

I haven't used support where I'm emailing or speaking to someone directly, but I've used a lot of the online support just by looking at different user guides, health guides, and things like that. Everything is really well documented. 

Sometimes there are posts about similar issues but with different remediation based on different circumstances. You might have the answer open in a tab, but you've got nine tabs open to find the right answer.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I have used Ubuntu, CentOS, openSUSE, and Mint. Red Hat Enterprise Linux definitely has an edge in security and the ability to control what the user at the end stage is doing. However, it is difficult to learn.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The licensing makes perfect sense for the number of features you get with the operating system.

What other advice do I have?

We test Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, the latest version. We do backtesting for versions 7 and 8 as well. The product is very secure. It took me a while to wrap my head around the whole Subscription Manager system and understand how that worked. Even at a base level, it provides a much higher level of security and the ability to take remediation steps if things go wrong. You can shut the whole system down and bring it back from the ground up.

From the keynote, it looks like steps are already being taken to make the solution more accessible to any regular user. 

The product does a really fantastic job of reducing the overall risk to the user. If a user is doing something they’re not supposed to be doing, it's very easy for the system administrator to walk them out of doing it. As for maintaining compliance, if a user is only meant to have specific packs and is only meant to perform specific tasks, it's very, very easy to lock it into only being able to do that one specific thing.

Most people in IT enjoy a little learning. Everything I've done so far with Red Hat has been installing, setting up the account, getting everything registered, and then worrying about testing to validate. It is difficult to start with, but the more you learn about it, the easier it gets. The more I use it, the more capabilities I find within the system.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
VAS Regional Project Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Real User
May 29, 2023
Provides valuable security insight, is extremely stable, and is easy to deploy
Pros and Cons
  • "The most valuable feature is the security insight and the internal firewall, which are common in all the machine tests that we use a lot."
  • "As a developer, I would like to have access to this software so that I can install the tools that I need."

What is our primary use case?

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system for our databases and application servers. We also use Red Hat Enterprise Linux to create some of our applications, such as the Online Challenge system. I work for a telecommunications company, and we have a few other operating systems in use, such as Unix and AIX, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is our primary operating system.

We deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premises and in the cloud. For the cloud, we use Azure and Huawei.

How has it helped my organization?

We work with virtual servers, so we have the image ready to deploy. It's great because the patch is always updated and we have no problems.

Red Hat Insights has helped us avoid emergencies in unpatched systems by identifying bugs so that we can fix them.

Red Hat Insights provides us with vulnerability alerts and targeted guidance, which helps prevent downtime and increases our uptime to 99 percent. 

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the security insight and the internal firewall, which are common in all the machine tests that we use a lot. The terminal framework and security are all Linux.

What needs improvement?

I believe this is because we don't have access to package management software. As a developer, I would like to have access to this software so that I can install the tools that I need. Currently, we are restricted to installing software only with permission from the system administrator. This is time-consuming and inefficient, as we have to follow a process to request permission. I believe that having access to package management software would improve our productivity and efficiency.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extremely stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's scalability is good because of virtualization. With virtualization, we can request more space or memory processing without having to make any changes to our system. This makes the process of scaling up or down very straightforward.

How are customer service and support?

The technical support is great but nothing is perfect.

How would you rate customer service and support?

Positive

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I previously used Ubuntu Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise. I switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it has better support. I haven't tried the others, but Red Hat looks like it has better support. However, Ubuntu is more compatible with desktop development, making it more user-friendly.

How was the initial setup?

As a developer, I find the initial setup to be easy. Deployment takes a few hours, but I understand the server, so it is not a problem. I do not actually do the deployment; the infrastructure team handles that. They made the process easier and faster, and on average, deployment now takes around four to six hours.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

We purchased our license from ITM, our local provider.

What other advice do I have?

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

I make the applications compatible with the cloud so we can migrate the data.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is good, but I don't use it much because the infrastructure team manages issues with the OS. I only check the documentation when an application is not working as expected. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: June 2026
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.