Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

We have an older environment with a lot of servers. They are development servers for a lot of in-house development. We have a lot of things. We have Ruby on Rails, Java, and a lot of Oracle applications

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is mostly on-prem in my current job. In my previous jobs, we have had it on AWS or Azure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features are good when it comes to simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance. It is something that they do very well. It is one of the reasons why we like running it. It is rock solid in all areas. Red Hat does a really good job of keeping on top of vulnerabilities and making the patching process easy.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has impacted our uptime and security. We have had no breaches, and our systems are usually up.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not yet enabled us to achieve security standards certification because that is not a requirement for where we are, but I am pretty confident that we would meet those standards. Our security teams are usually chasing problems on the other side of the house.

I like most of the features. I like its stability. I like its views. It provides a very stable environment. There is not a lot of downtime. There are not a lot of issues. Primarily, we are deploying things and configuring things, and occasionally, we add new things for developers as needed, but it does not require much troubleshooting or break fixing. That is rare.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux is another thing I like about it. It is particularly easy to find an answer to your problem online. There is very good documentation, very good user communities, and good support when you need it.

The upgrade procedures are a little bit cumbersome. It would be nice if they are not because every three or four years we have to update, and I find that to be a bit on the cumbersome side. We have been able to automate most of it, but we still run into things where the job does not finish. There are things that require additional steps. There are things that need to be removed and that always require manual intervention. I do not know how they can get rid of that, but it is cumbersome in an environment where you have hundreds or thousands of servers.

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

I would rate their support a nine out of ten. I just do not give tens. I am sure there are some areas where they can improve, but they are good. They are responsive.

I have got experience with Windows and Solaris before that. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is my favorite. With Solaris, that stream stopped a long time ago, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux has all of the nice things about it, and they have continued to develop and build many new things. For instance, when you had to patch on a Solaris box, you had to take the server down into single-user mode and apply the patching. I like it better than Windows in every way. It is more intuitive to me. I like that I can do more things from the command line. It is easier to automate things.

I have been involved in the upgrades and some migrations for migrating things from Solaris. We also had CentOS, which was converted to DevStream, so we have had to change those to Red Hat. The upgrades and migrations were not terribly difficult. Usually, the tools were there. We called support when we ran into problems, but for the most part, it worked.

I have used Convert2RHEL. It was a bit helpful. It did the job.

We mostly use Ansible for deployment, patching, and managing the system in general. Our experience has been good. I am looking at some of the newer things they have at the conference that we have not had a chance to play with, but it meets our needs.

We have seen a return on our investment. We are able to do what we need to do without any problems or interruptions, and we are able to do it quickly.

For me, it is not too bad, but my company pays the bill, so I do not worry too much about it. 

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

We host Red Hat Enterprise Linux on our VMware Cloud and manage our customers' machines.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux machines are more stable than Windows machines.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps to avoid cloud vendor lock-in.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a reliable operating system that can run for long periods of time without any issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux should modernize its UI to make navigating the screens easier.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be easily scaled on a virtual machine.

The technical support is good.

Positive

I was not involved in the initial deployment but it was straightforward. The deployment took around 15 minutes per machine.

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

I recommend using Red Hat Enterprise Linux over an open-source OS because it offers better support.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux requires minimal maintenance.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a reliable solution and I recommend it to others.

I use the product mostly for Red Hat OpenShift. We use the solution mainly for stability and to have a fallback within the Red Hat community.

There was a worldwide security breach, and everybody needed to patch their servers. Since we were running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the product patched a lot of it. It took a lot of effort out of our hands.

It is a complete ecosystem. That is its main feature. If you take all the latest products, it just works together.

The tool is very, very close. It makes some things difficult. On the other hand, that is what makes the product so stable. The product lags a bit behind in the market. The things we are running are pretty old. Yet again, that is why it is stable. The solution doesn’t switch with every new thing there is. The solution does not need to change that because that's what makes it good.

The product could run more recent tools and packages in the repositories. However, it might bring instability because they are new and less tested. I looked at CentOS, which was close to Red Hat. It had a system working, but a few months later, it didn't work again because the packages and contracts had changed. We couldn’t communicate anymore. It’s not desirable with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We want stability. The price we pay for it is that we run on some older features.

I have been using the solution on and off for the last 15 years.

I have no complaints regarding the tool’s stability.

The product is scalable. We use the solution all the time. We use it in multiple locations. We have two physical data centers where we run it. We run it on a few 100 machines.

The technical support is very helpful.

Positive

I have used CentOS and Debian.

The deployment is straightforward. However, there’s a learning curve to understand it. The deployment would be difficult for a newcomer, but it’s normal. We use automation tools. The deployment takes us a few minutes because we use scripts.

The solution is deployed on the cloud. However, it’s an on-premise solution from the Dutch government. We do not have control over the physical servers. We just work on virtual machines. The license fees are paid by another government agency. We take machines, and then they bill us for it.

We used some integration for the deployment. That's why it was so fast. We use a base image as the setup, and then, on top of that, we install some extra things. It’s just about cloning an image and starting it.

The solution does require maintenance, but nothing more than the usual. We need a team of four people with Linux knowledge to maintain the solution.

The product is on the expensive side.

Very early in my career, we had evaluated SUSE Linux as an alternative to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. SUSE has its own niche market now.

We are not working in a hybrid environment. I work with the Dutch government, and the regular cloud solutions are not sufficient because of data safety.

Moving workloads between the cloud and our data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is not really an issue. The network connectivity is good. The data storage is fast enough. Cloud vendor lock-in is always a debatable discussion. Whatever we do, we always get vendor lock-in. We just choose what works for us at the moment.

The cost savings are mainly in time. We don't have to figure out everything if there's a priority-one issue. We can raise a ticket with the vendor and ask them to help us. It saves us costs. The savings are mostly in time because the product is not cheap. If you compare it to a free Linux OS, the total cost savings will be about the same. Our level of stress and effort is far lower. It's the real saving.

When my Red Hat Knowledgebase account works, it works fine. However, there are some issues at my company. I cannot log in sometimes. It's not Red Hat’s fault.

Look at what your priorities are. Do you want to switch fast, run the latest stuff, and be agile? Then, use open-source tools and contribute to that community. If you work for a big enterprise and mainly want stability, choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I’m very happy with the solution. If someone is a technical person, they must get some training and an in-depth technical course on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It will help them a lot. Although it is Linux, it is very different from other open-source Linux packages.

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

We use the product to host operating systems, applications, or infrastructure for our customers. Our customers use the product as a long-term solution that they don't have to upgrade every other year. They can get people that know the solution from the get-go.

The biggest feature is the longevity of the distribution. Compared to any other product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a stable backported solution for a long time. It is important because we have moved a lot of software containers. We want to update it but don't want to unless we have to. So it's great to have something stable for a long time.

The biggest thing that the solution could introduce is an even slimmer version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are moving to containers, but we also have a lot of void loads that don't go into containers. It would be nice to have an even thinner operating system. Even if you choose minimally, you still get a lot of useless stuff you don't need.

I have been using the solution for 20 years.

I rate the product’s stability a nine out of ten.

I rate the solution’s scalability a seven out of ten.

It's really difficult to get to someone that knows something. When you get to the right people, support is really good. But there are a lot of people that can only answer first-level questions.

Neutral

We're using a lot of different OSs. We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because we are a partner.

It's pretty simple to install the product. However, some tools required to install it are missing.

The pricing is great for virtual systems. The pricing for physical systems is way too high.

The overall costs depend on the project and the company.

We continuously evaluate other options. The main difference between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other solutions is the complete ecosystem's longevity and possibility. Other products may present something similar, but they don't have the ecosystem around them.

We probably purchased the solution from a cloud provider. We are using versions 5 to 9 currently.

The solution’s built-in security features are pretty good, but it's not something that I would take as a major selling point. The portability is good because we have a stable baseline for applications and containers. Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s security posture is pretty good. I don’t know if it's the strongest selling point, but it's up there.

In some ways, Red Hat Enterprise Linux enables us to centralize development. However, that's not mostly what we focus on. The primary output from Red Hat Insights is targeted guidance. Targeted guidance has not affected our uptime much.

It makes sense to go with a stable distribution compared to others. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

We use it to host applications, services, and backend databases. We aren't using it on the cloud. Most of my customers are DoD or some type of government agency. If it's not classified, it's siloed in some way. We don't get to use a lot of the functionality that makes Red Hat cool. It's all disconnected.

In terms of version, currently, mostly everything is on versions 7 and 8. I've started pulling up some of the things from version 9, but that won't go into production for a while.

We use it because it's stable. That's half the reason, and the other half is because the DoD standardizes on it because it has a support contract, so even though we're forced to use it, it's a very good product, and it's on-prem. We probably would use it anyway.

We needed to host applications, services, and backend databases. We have a lot of Java-based applications, and we wanted something that we could deploy in different places around the world and that everybody standardized. Windows didn't really work for us on that. Most of the time, we're not connected to the Internet. We find that Red Hat or Linux in general works a little bit better for us than macOS or Windows.

It's also across the board a little bit cheaper for what we're using it for. That's a benefit we're getting from it.

We get our compliance from DISA, which is the defense information service agency. They put out security technical implementation guides. There are specific ones for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 and 8. The reason we're not using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 is that there isn't one for it yet. In terms of how we harden the operating system we're using, it's whatever they tell us to do and then whatever extra we want to do. It's as good as any other Linux other than the fact that it's supported by the DoD. For example, SELinux helps us secure across the board with contacts across different directories and things like that. They tell us how standardized the SD-WAN layout should be. We're able to go a little bit deeper into that. Red Hat uses Podman, which has SELinux, and which by default helps us a lot. 

We run Satellite on a lot of these, so having a central repository that we can use for patch management and remote execution is huge. That's something that is very difficult in a Windows environment. We're very compliance driven, so to have that built into Red Hat is easy. We don't need an agent or anything like that to get a lot of work done, so Satellite and centralized automation are the most valuable features for us. We're dabbling into Ansible but not as much as we should be.

It's obviously a security-focused operating system versus some of the other operating systems that lay you down in the terminal as root. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, you can't even root. It's disabled by default now. Overall, they are definitely more security conscious, and that's also because of their primary customer space.

I've been using it for ten years or so. I've been using the solution since version 6. 

The stability of what we have deployed is good. The only time it crashes is if we do something or we try to configure a control that one of the engineers doesn't fully understand, which then breaks it. A lot of it's just like us breaking it ourselves or a customer asking for something that wasn't initially planned. Just pure deployment is good.

Its scalability is good. It's what they excel at. If we have 10 machines or 100 machines, they have the platforms to scale that up.

Overall, the customer support is good. It's better than Microsoft support. They are above and beyond that. They are better than others in terms of response time, getting somebody who knows what they're talking about, and not spinning their wheel. Usually, within the first response or two, people figure out what we're trying to troubleshoot here. We're not going from one queue to another queue or anything like that.

I'd rate them a ten out of ten. I've never had an issue with it. 

Positive

We had CentOS systems. When they changed upstream, we had to pivot some systems. We pivot some systems to Oracle Enterprise Linux, but then those eventually got transitioned to Red Hat as well.

The main reason for the switch to Red Hat was for the government customer and having a support contract. You can do Oracle Enterprise Linux without a support contract, but if you're going to buy one, you might as well get Red Hat at that point for the added benefits.

We use Kali for a couple of other use cases, and we probably won't replace it with Red Hat.

We've used a lot of flavors of Linux. One thing that sticks out for me, even in just the home lab environment or deploying at work, is that if there's some backward thing that we weren't planning on going into, if I look for a solution, nine out of ten times, I'm going to find an article on Red Hat's website where somebody has either a verified solution or somebody is talking about it and there are comments that are relevant. I hate going on ServerStack, Ubuntu Stack, or something like that, where somebody has the exact problem that you have, but there are no comments and no answers. I find that to be less true with the Red Hat platform.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward but can be tedious at times because of the compliance things that we have to implement. 

I just sat in on the training or the demo for the deployment platform, and we're already planning on setting up the Ansible automation platform where we also want to look into setting up this deployment tool because we do a lot of ISOs. We do a lot of kickstarts. We don't do any of the cloud tenants. We probably will switch to using the on-premise disconnected deployment capability because we can preconfigure everything and then run Ansible after the fact to get it all compliant.

We're the integrators or implementors of the solution.

We're forced to buy the licensing, but it's also good. I and a couple of other staff members are all Red Hat certified engineers, and then we all have our own specialties, so we don't call them a lot, but when we submit tickets, it's definitely worth it.

The ROI is mainly in terms of needing to recover from any system downtime. If we don't have an engineer on a computer doing a certain piece of research, then we're wasting money or just not generating a product, so to have the support that we can call and then reach out to us in enough turnaround time holds value for us.

The pricing is fair. The workstation licensing cost is fair. If you're running enterprise-level deployments, depending on what you're using, the volume licensing is good. I personally am worried that if they get so successful, they can increase the price, and then it won't matter because we'll be stuck on them. Hopefully, their open source mentality keeps that from happening. Where it's right now is good.

In terms of the portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I don't know how much that applies to us. In our case, someone develops an application in a Podman container, and we ingest that and run it, but we're not doing much more than that. So, all of the Java-based applications that we run, are run within a couple of different containers, and that's about it.

I personally use Red Hat Insights in my home lab. We can't dial out for that for a lot of customer-based work, but I personally use it. It hasn't helped avoid any emergencies because it's super low risk for what I'm using it for, but I can see the benefit of it. In a more enterprise setup, such as health care where I used to work, things probably would have been interconnected, and we would have been using Insights, but we're not using it currently.

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

Primarily, we use it for a couple of different servers. Some are doing data hosting, and some are doing network management-type functions.

We use it on-premises. We do not use it on the cloud. Because of government work, we're not cloud-based.

By implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we were mainly looking for stability. By having a lot of open source solutions, we ran into problems where there were too many flavors and too many variables. We ran into issues with ISO and other things where this particular site was a one-off from this site, which was a one-off from this site, which was one-off from this site. That became a problem for making sure that we stick to a consistent level and patch to a consistent level across the board.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been good. We do a lot of containerization and a lot of microservices. It has worked really well. It helped in keeping our organization agile. Our partners provided us with a lot of quick utilities and reuse of things. We can shut down a container and spin up a new container to introduce new capability quicker. 

The biggest feature that I have found valuable is stability. 

The way it lent itself to automation has been very invaluable for us. It makes the setups a lot more consistent and repeatable across the board. We're able to deploy the product quickly in a very consistent manner, which meets our timelines. A lot of what we do has very short spending dates, and they need a lot of product work.

It has been pretty good for us. I have no complaints as such. We just learned that we can get access to more support documents by going through the portal. I didn't know that. If it was something that was more known or advertised, that would have helped us to find out some of the information a little better.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for about a couple of years.

It's a 10 out of 10 in terms of stability.

It's a 10 out of 10 in terms of scalability.

The customer service is good. There is a lot of support documentation out there for anything you're looking for.

Positive

We tried quite a few flavors of different things, but nothing provided the consistency that we are getting with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We tried everything such as Ubuntu, Mint, etc.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux stood out for its consistency and stability. We had several different problems with drivers on Mint. There were so many different flavors. We had one developer who built everything on one, and then another developer built on another, and none of that was coming together. It was not meshing, so we finally went to a common platform with stability and supportability. It was a lot better. It has allowed the developers to focus more on their code rather than having to worry about fighting the underlying things, such as drivers aren't on this one, and that one is not working.

It was very straightforward. We've pushed in further to make our own ISOs, so we're making sure that everything is getting the same applications and everything is deployed across the board, and we are able to virtualize in some cases. It has been good.

You definitely get what you're paying for. From what we've seen, it has been great. It has also allowed virtualization and making their own ISOs. We're able to package all that up, and it has worked consistently and repeatability. We've written our own Bash scripts so that we can automatically deploy that and stick it as part of the build. We're saving a lot of time and getting to a common platform repeatedly.

Overall, I'd rate it a nine out of 10. There's always room for a little bit of improvement.

I work in the financial industry in Brazil and my first job was to use Linux.

We deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-prem and in the cloud. Our cloud provider is AWS. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for web applications, including the JBoss data bridge. We also have some applications for prevention and risk. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is used for most of our applications in Brazil, so it is used for almost everything.

We run our workloads and applications on AWS.

There are many Linux-based operating systems. We wanted an operating system that was mature and reliable, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the best choice for us.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a highly resilient operating system. It has a strong XFS file system, kernel, and package build.

Migrating workloads between the cloud and our data center is easy. There are no problems.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux helps a lot. It is very useful and has helped me to resolve the issue by looking at the documentation.

The integrity of our operational systems is very stable. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a good file system type and good kernels. It does not crash for any reason. This makes it a very stable platform for me. It is the best solution for our needs.

There was a reduction in the amount of detail provided in backlog messages between Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions six and seven, compared to versions eight and nine. This makes it more difficult to troubleshoot errors in versions eight and nine, as users must dig deeper into the operating system to find the source of the problem. Versions six and seven provided more detailed error messages, which made it easier to identify and fix problems. Deploying applications using Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions six and seven was seamless. However, there is a chance that something could be broken when deploying with versions eight and nine, and we may not know it.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since versions four and five.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extremely stable.

One of the reasons we adopted the Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem is because of its ability to scale.

I have not had a good experience with Red Hat engineers. When we have an issue, it is very difficult to have it resolved in the first call. They always have to escalate the issue and involve multiple people. At a minimum, we have to escalate an issue three or four times before it is resolved. The support team in Brazil has helped me a lot because they work with me to resolve the problem, but if I have to open a ticket and follow the steps I never get proper service.

I give the technical support of Red Hat a zero out of ten.

Negative

The initial deployment is easy. I can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux myself using a base image within a few minutes both on-prem and in the cloud.

The implementation is completed in-house.

We purchased our license from Red Hat.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten.

Cloud vendor lock-in is inevitable when we adopt the cloud. This is because once we adopt a cloud service, such as DynamoDB or AWS, we become dependent on that provider for support and maintenance. It is very difficult to work with multiple clouds 100 percent of the time, as this can lead to problems with failover and other issues in multiple cloud environments because the risk is high.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux ecosystem is more attractive because we are not just buying an operating system. We are buying an ecosystem that helps, supports, and secures our platform. I believe this is the better option.

Applying patches in the new versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is more time-consuming than in Oracle Linux because Oracle Linux does not require legacy environments to be patched or changed through applications.

For someone looking for an open source cloud-based Linux OS instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I recommend AWS Linux. It is a very stable version of Linux and does not require a subscription.

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for web application support, mainly OpenShift.

Azure is the cloud provider.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easier to manage because it can scale to a large amount and be managed across many platforms. This can lead to cost savings for our organization.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has reduced the amount of management required on the Windows side.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is extremely resilient because it is much more secure.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's day-to-day functionality is very easy.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped our organization save money by not requiring large-scale virtual machines, resources, or images.

OpenShift is the most valuable feature because it can be used to create applications on the fly.

The UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement.

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

I am impressed with how extremely stable Red Hat Enterprise Linux is.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's scalability is excellent.

Technical support is quick to respond, but sometimes tickets can get stuck in tier one for a while before they are escalated.

Positive

We previously used Windows but switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for cost savings.

The initial setup is straightforward. We can copy and paste any templates we need into the environment.

We have seen a return on our investment simply from receiving timely support when needed.

We purchased the Red Hat Enterprise Linux license via Azure and the vendor.

We evaluated CentOS but ultimately chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of the support.

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

When evaluating operating system options, keep in mind that Red Hat offers the best support.