Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

I'm using Red Hat as an OI solution with some Oracle databases and an FTB server on top of it. I am not using containers in Red Hat. It's solely serving as an OS with direct applications installed on it. We have a few thousand users benefiting from Red Hat indirectly, but only 10 to 20 people work directly with it. I only use Red Hat in one location right now. Previously, I had it deployed in a cluster. 

The most important thing for any organization is stability and uptime for the application and the environment. Red Hat provides us with stability and uptime, and it gives us all the tools we need to integrate with our other solutions. 

It's also a suitable environment for applying security certificates. You can perform all the requirements on Red Hat. For example, you can do everything you need to comply with BCI, ISO, or any other certificate. 

The most valuable thing about Red Hat is its stability, uptime, and support for various hardware vendors. Linux servers, in general, are relatively secure and they are more secure than Windows and other products. 

Red Hat provides additional tools to customize your environment and harden your OS. For example, you can apply security patches and use benchmarks. You can do everything in Red Hat, so you can always have a highly secure environment. The interface is pretty good. Our engineers like the PLI interface.

I've been using Red Hat for around 10 years. 

Red Hat is as stable as you want it to be. We periodically have some bugs, but we can resolve these issues quickly. 

Red Hat can be scalable, especially if you are using it for virtualization. For example, KVM is easy to implement and scale up. You only need to add more nodes to scale as much as you want.

I rate Red Hat support nine out of ten. It's nearly perfect. Red Hat support has one of the best teams I've dealt with. 

Positive

I've used some open-source environments like CentOS and some other solutions like Solaris and HBOX. We switched to Red Hat because it's easier to deploy and manage.

Setting up Red Hat is straightforward if you're doing a basic installation. They have a beautiful installer that handles everything. For a more advanced deployment, you may need to go through some more complicated steps to customize it for everyone's best practices. 

You only need one person to handle the installation, which takes anywhere from a few minutes to an hour, depending on the installation. If you install Red Hat correctly based on your requirements, you don't need to perform any maintenance. You might need to patch, upgrade, add resources or harden the OS. When discussing security, you always need to follow up on patching and security hardening.

The cost could be lower. Red Hat is considered a costly solution. It can be expensive if you want all the features in the license. A cheaper license would make Red Hat more accessible to a broader range of users. It's reasonable given the features and performance, but a lower price would encourage more people to adopt it.

We looked at HBOX servers, but they are far more expensive than Red Hat. Red Hat is more optimal in terms of cost versus performance and stability than other solutions like Solaris and HBOX.

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux nine out of ten. It's an excellent solution. Go for Red Hat If you want stability at a reasonable cost. It's the best.

We use RHEL for database servers, a few of them run Oracle servers, and we are also using it for some of the network and infrastructure services.

The best operating system I've ever used is Red Hat, in terms of its ability and consistency of the operating system. Other than that, the vast majority of applications that I had, I could deploy those on Red Hat without much effort as it supported a vast majority of applications. I never faced any major issues with the OS, the support is also very good.

The most valuable features are:

• The stability and reliability of the OS itself
• Being open-source and leading the open-source market trends/ technologies
  
• The wide variety of applications we can deploy on Red Hat
• Their support 

I am a big fan of the OS and the user experience. They're very good. The OS is very stable and very good in performance as well.

RHEL enables us to deploy current applications and emerging workloads across all virtualized hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments. It is one of the most stable OS that are available. 

We use RHEL to run multiple versions of the same applications and databases on a specific operating system. We have several deployments of database and a few of them are running on a bit older versions of Red Hat and some of them are running on newer versions. We are running different versions on different platforms. The management aspect is also very good, especially when we need updates on the different packages from the RH support network, management is easy.

We also use the tracing and monitoring tools to monitor OS as well as applications running on RHEL platform. The OpenShift is also a big plus through which you can manage and deploy enterprise-ready containerized workloads.

Being an advocate of open source technologies I always wished that Red Hat subscription/ support should be offered free of cost. Having said that, I understand the economics involved in running large enterprise like Red Hat; support cost is one area that can be improved. They should offer it at reduced prices.

I have been using RHEL since the start of my technical career, which was around the mid of 2003. So it's been almost 18+ years. I started using RH when it was version 7.

Stability has always been a plus for RHEL. 

Scalability is excellent. With the introduction of hybrid and multi-cloud support, one can scale up as well as scale out his workloads pretty easily. We usually scale up our traditional workloads when we need more resources i.e., during peak seasons. 

Four people in my team are responsible for deployment and support of Linux based workloads. 

We have around 300 virtual machines (VMs) and roughly 20% of them are running on Linux environment.

Whenever I open a case, I believe the support team will be able to solve my problem. They are very good at it. The documentation RHEL provides is also very good. Almost all the time, I get a solution to my problem. :)

We are using other flavors of Linux OSes, that include Oracle Enterprise Linux (OEL) and CentOS, both of which are binary compatible with RHEL. We are also using a couple of other Linux flavors like Ubuntu and OpenSUSE.

RHEL provides features that help speed our deployment. Installing on a physical server takes more time than installing it onto a virtual machine (VM).

Because of absence of local support in our part of the region, we did find some difficulties in the initial deployments with hardware vendors/ partners when we started in 2003. The local partners didn't have much knowledge of Linux environments at that time, and the support for hardware was also a bit tricky. The deployment took a couple of days until we got support from the hardware manufacturer.

Nowadays, it's very good. I managed to get good support from the hardware vendors after that incident.

We have our own deployment plans for the operating systems that include some baseline configurations and security checklists.

We usually deploy in-house as we have a trained team. Occasionally, little help is sought from the vendor teams, some of them have skilled professionals.

RHEL offers an efficient, cost-effective and reliable OS environment for enterprise-level environments. Similarly cost of running operations and the scalability factors make RHEL a good choice for providing a better ROI. The feature set it offers, support for a variety of applications, ease of deployment, and an excellent level of support all result in a good ROI. 

I believe for an enterprise-level operating system and the feature set RHEL offers, it's like any other enterprise platform cost. The introduction of OpenShift is also a big plus in terms of deployment and management of container based workloads. Red Hat as mentioned earlier can improve a bit on support/ subscription costs.

We had been using a couple of Red Hat variants for some scientific experiments that included Scientific Linux CERN (SLC) and Scientific Linux (SL), which were a confidence booster for choosing and deploying RHEL for production workloads.

Since I started with version RH 7, I believe the GUI is quite close to any other GUI operating system. There have always been a variety of tools and features that attract a non-Linux user.  As already mentioned, RHEL has been a pioneer in open-source technologies; it continued to evolve with changing market needs, that has been a big success for them.

I would definitely advise choosing RHEL if you need stability, scalability, and reliability of the OS platform. I would be a big advocate for the use of Red Hat to any new person who wants to deploy his production workloads, on-prem or on cloud on a Linux environment.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. It's near perfect. 

It started mostly with websites and open source environments overall for development. Now, we are moving into business applications as we are migrating our ERP, which is a cp -r tree, to Linux. We are also migrating the database of SAP to SAP HANA on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. 

We use RHEL versions 7 and 8. There is a bit of version 6 still lying around, but we are working on eradicating that. It is mostly RHEL Standard subscriptions, but there are a few Premium subscriptions, depending on how critical the applications are.

It has fulfilled all the promises or goals of different projects, not just because our internal team is strong, but also because our external partner is strong.

Satellite is an optional system which provides for extensive deployment and patch management. That is quite valuable.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux's tracing and monitoring tools. You don't leave them on all the time, as far as tracing is concerned. When you are sick and go to the doctor, that is when you use it, e.g., when an application is sick or things are really unexplainable. It gives you a good wealth of information. In regards to monitoring, we are using them to a point. We are using Insights and Insight Sender as well as the Performance Co-Pilot (PCP), which is more something we look at once in a while. 

Other Red Hat products integrate with Red Hat Enterprise Linux very well. In fact, they integrate with pretty much everything around the universe. We are doing API calls without even knowing what an API is, i.e., towards VMware vCenter as well as Centreon. There are certain individuals who use it for free without subscription and support for Ansible in our Telco group with great success.

Linux overall needs improvement. They cannot go much beyond what Linus Torvalds's kernel implementation can do. I come from AIX, and there were very cool things in AIX that I am missing dearly, e.g., being able to support not only adding, but also reducing memory and number of processors. That is not supported on Linux right now, and it is the same for the mainstream file systems supported by Red Hat. There is no way of reducing a file system or logical volume. Whereas, in AIX, it was a shoo-in. These are the little things where we can say, "Ah, we are missing AIX for that."

We are not loving our servers anymore. If we need them, we create them. When we don't need them, we delete them. That is what they are. They are just commodities. They are just a transient product.

I have been using it for nine years, since 2012.

The stability has been very good. However, there is a learning curve. We were running huge in-memory databases, about 2.5 terabytes of RAM, which is SAP HANA. Then, we were getting really weird problems, so we asked the app guys 20,000 times to open a ticket because we were seeing all kinds of weird timeouts and things like that on the OS side. We were saying, "It's the app. It takes forever." Finally, they said, "Oh yeah, we use a back-level thing that is buggy and creates a problem." It took us six months and four people to get that from the app guys. We were ready to kill them. That was not good. Whatever you put on Linux, make sure that you have somebody supporting it who is not dumb, or on any platform for that matter.

The scalability is six terabytes. That is what we're doing. We are printing HANA servers on that scale, which are more in the 2.5 terabyte range. However, we had to create one for the migration initiative on the VMware, which was six terabytes with 112 cores. It worked, and that was it. It also works with bare-metal, but you have to be aware there are challenges in regards to drivers and things.

RHEL provides features that help our speed deployment. For example, for SAP HANA, they have full-fledged support for failover clustering using Red Hat HA, which is a solution to create a vintage approach of failover clustering. They do provide extensive support for value-adds for ERP solutions.

They also provide value left, right, and center. Whenever we have a problem, they are always there. We have used both their professional services as well as their Technical Account Manager (TAM) services, which is a premium service to manage the different challenges that we have had within our business. They have always come through for us, and it is a great organization overall.

Their support is wonderful. They will go beyond what is supposed to be supported. For example, we had a ransomware attack. They went 20 times above what we were expecting of them, using software provided by them on a pro bono basis, meaning take it and do whatever you want with it, but it was not ours. That was a nice surprise. So, whenever we have needed them, they did not come with a bill. They came with support, listening, and solutions. That is what we expect of a partner, and that is what they are: a partner.

I, for one, was managing AIX, which is a legacy Unix, as my core competency. I still do because we haven't completed the migration. 

RHEL is a value-add right now. As we are migrating more payloads to containers, we are putting less Linux forethought into these container-hosting servers. You just shove your containers on top of them with your orchestrations. This may reduce our need to manage RHEL like a bunch of containers. That changes the business. 

We were paying for premium SUSE support for an initial pilot of SAP HANA on the IBM POWER platform. We were stuck between an IBM organization telling us, "Go to SUSE for your support," and the SUSE organization saying, "Go to IBM for your support." So, we told them both to go away. 

We are so glad that we haven't mixed the Red Hat and IBM more, because SUSE and IBM don't mix, and we were mixing them. That was prior to the merger with Red Hat. In regards to IBM's ownership of Red Hat, we are a bit wary, but we think that IBM will have the wisdom not to mess it up, but we will see. There is a risk.

The initial setup is as straightforward as it can get for anyone who knows what they are talking about. It does require technical knowledge, because that's what it is: a technical solution. It is not something that I would give to my mother. Contrary to other people's perception of, "My mom had a problem with her Windows. Oh, put her on Linux." Yeah, no thanks. Give her a tablet, please. Tablets are pretty cool for non-techies, and even for techies to a certain extent. 

For the migration from AIX, Ansible has been our savior. You do need somebody who knows Ansible, then it is more about printing your servers. So, you press on the print button, then you give it to the apps guys, but you do have to know what you are trying to aim for so the guy who is creating the Ansible Playbook codes exactly what is required with the right variables. After that, it is just a question of shoving that into production. It is pretty wonderful.

We do get a return on investment with this solution in regards to a comparative cost of ownership of going with the niche solution of IBM AIX systems and hardware. There is a tremendous difference in cost. It is about tenfold.

The integrated solution approach reduces our TCO tremendously because we are able to focus on innovation instead of operations.

RHEL is a great place to go. They have a great thing that is not very well-known, which is called the Learning Subscription, which is a one-year all-you-can-drink access to all of their online self-paced courses as well as their certifications. While it is a premium to have the certifications as well, it is very cool to have that because you end up as a Red Hat certified engineer in a hurry. It is good to have the training because then you are fully versed in doing the Red Hat approach to the equation, which is a no-nonsense approach.

Because it is a subscription, you can go elastic. This means you can buy a year, then you can skip a year. It is not like when you buy something. You don't buy it. You are paying for the support on something, and if you don't pay for the support on something, there is no shame because there are no upfront costs. It changes the equation. However, we have such growth right now on the Linux platform that we are reusing and scavenging these licenses. From a business standpoint, not having to buy, but just having to pay for maintenance, changes a lot of the calculations.

We tried SUSE on the IBM POWER platform, and it was a very lonely place to be in. That was for SAP HANA migration. We are glad that we decided to be mainstream with leveraging what we already had at Red Hat Linux (over a few dead bodies now). We also leveraged the Intel x86 platform, which is very mainstream. 

We are not using the Red Hat Virtualization product. We are using VMware just so we can conform to the corporate portfolio.

Our RHEL alerting and operation dashboard is not our route one right now. We have been using Centreon, which is derived from the Nagios approach, for about seven years.

With AIX, we couldn't get a single software open source to run. It was like a write-off, except for reducing a file system or logical volume in Linux.

We are a bunch of techies here. RHEL is not managed by end users. We don't really mind the GUIs, because the first thing that we do is stop using them. We are using Ansible, which is now part of RHEL, and that can automate the living heck out of everything. For now, we are not using the Power approach, but we may in the future. We are doing a business case for that, as it would be an easy sell for some communities and the use cases are not techie-to-techies.

There is a cloud, but we have very little infrastructure as a service in the cloud right now. 

It delivers to the targeted audiences. Could Red Hat Enterprise Linux be used in all types of other scenarios? Most likely. They have an embedded version for microcontrollers, i.e., things that you put into your jewelry or light switches. However, this is not what they're aiming for.

I would rate RHEL as a nine and a half (out of 10), but I will round that up to 10.

We use containers to create RPM packages for graphics drivers.

The main reason to use Red Hat Enterprise Linux is to maintain support for creating images for various purposes, including what we use for gaming. We rely on a range of supported tools and resources, and this enables us to build images tailored for specific target devices.

The RPM manager is paramount for us, as we need to generate these packages for our customers, enabling them to install the packages on their systems at a later time. The knowledge base they offer has proven to be quite efficient and we haven't encountered any significant challenges.

The technical support should be improved. I believe it would be beneficial to notify the customer in advance of any planned maintenance so that we can better coordinate and plan our customer interactions accordingly.

We have been using it for six years.

Recently, we encountered issues when the Red Hat server was in maintenance mode, and we attempted to capture images directly from another server for our builds. Although I set up alerts for planned downtime on the Red Hat server, I didn't consistently receive these alerts. I would rate it seven out of ten.

Neutral

We follow a weekly patching schedule to fetch the latest updates. Our process involves applying these patches to the image and then generating containers, which we subsequently upload to our registry. We accomplish this using Ansible.

The only inconsistency we've noticed so far is with the server, which might be the only aspect we could potentially raise concerns about. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

We use this solution for disaster assistance. 

This solution has increased the speed of our technology. It is easy to troubleshoot using RHEL. RHEL's built-in security features and security profiles for helping to reduce risk and maintain compliance are good. It has also improved our organization's management and efficiency.

The cost of this solution could be improved. 

I have been using this solution for four years. 

This is a stable solution and we have not had any major issues when using it. 

The customer support team are very responsive and always provide the help we need. I would rate the support a nine out of ten. 

Positive

We used to use JBoss at my previous company.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

Typically, we use this solution as a base to create and secure container images. Sometimes we use SELinux through RHEL and sometimes we only use RHEL. It is easier to apply STIG baselines to a RHEL system than other systems. We mainly use it for building and securing containers.

RHEL is different than any other Linux distribution folder. Folder locations are different and using this solution makes us more secure.

We are assured of added security because of the STIGs, automation and all the repositories that exist for securing Red Hat and SELinux. We have scripts that can automate the STIGing out of an RHEL machine, RHEL container or an RHEL BM.

It is also easy to troubleshoot using RHEL and follow the same process as other solutions such as Ubuntu, Debian, or Arch.

RHEL's effect on our organization's management and efficiency is noticeable because we check all the compliance boxes when we run STIG machines. It helps us because Red Hat is trusted in the governmental space. It also helps management save people's time by just having use of templated containers.

There's a lot more automation for STIGing out a Red Hat machine than there is in a Ubuntu or a Debian machine and this is one of the most valuable features. 

Since it's based off Fedora, I don't like the DNF package manager. 

I have been using this solution for six months. 

It's very stable. I've never had any breaking issues when upgrading packages or versions. 

We run this solution on a really small scale. We are a development group so we're not working on large-scale systems. We generate proof of concepts and then show that to the company for them to use so I can't really speak to how it scales.

Red Hat's tech support and customer service are really good. The Red Hat team are my favorite people to work with. They are easy to work with and genuinely care. I would rate them a nine out of ten. 

Positive

The initial setup is mostly straightforward depending on the specific setup. We build our own containers and that is more complex but there are simplex supported setups. In both scenarios, maintenance only involves a few commands and is simple. It is maintained by two security engineers. 

From an ROI perspective, this solution helps us win contracts. Contract values are negligible to what the RHEL licensing cost is. It has a really large effect on our contract deals because it gives our work and service credibility.

I would advise others to read up on the solution first. Try Fedora first before you get into Red Hat. There are some similarities and a lot of what you know about Linux transfers over. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We are internet service providers in Bangladesh and resellers of this product to our customers to manage their network infrastructure. 

I think this solution is more secure than others because it's not open source. Red Hat will ensure the details when you purchase the package. Having a certification will offer value. 

We've found that there is a huge demand for it. 

Although the security features are good, I'd like to see more added in the security sphere.

I've been using this solution for just three months and still not completely familiar with it. 

The solution is stable. 

The documentation is sufficient for my needs. 

The initial setup is easy, it takes around 10-15 minutes. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10. 

We use this solution for different projects. It's great as a realistic training platform and we've also used it for humanoid robots. We are platinum partners of Red Hat and I'm a digital solutions architect. 

We chose to go with this solution because it's easier to use than other operating systems. It provides illustration ability and better permissions. It has good compatibility which is an issue I have with other operating systems. I find it to be a more flexible product.

Most of the complaints people have about this solution revolve around security. It's not easy to increase that. 

I've used this solution for almost a year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We use the online community for our support and it's great. I can find the answers to all my questions there. 

I previously used CentOS, which is related to Red Hat. It was our client who decided to switch to Red Hat. I've also used Ubuntu which is an open-source solution with low security and therefore not suitable for enterprise-size organizations.  

The initial setup was straightforward because I'd already had some experience with Linux. Even without experience implementation is relatively easy. Deployment time depends on the project and usually takes longer with android applications because the deployment is not one process. We usually deploy on cloud, sometimes private and sometimes public. 

I think the licensing costs are reasonable. 

I recommend RHEL because although there's not much difference between it and CentOS, it does provide full support. If you have any issues you know where to turn and they can be solved. 

I rate RHEL nine out of 10.