Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

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. 

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 it for 

• some of our websites
• one of our main applications for the City of Gothenburg
• automation 
• the underlying operating system for our GitLab server.

We have many different databases running on RHEL. Among them we have MySQL and POSTGRES and they all run great on RHEL 7 and on RHEL 8.

Using this solution, we can offer our customers an easier way to get a WordPress site, and they can have POSTGRES and Tomcat installations, and these run smoother on Linux than they do on Windows.

We also use both Ansible and Satellite from Red Hat. They are integrated with RHEL and they work like a charm. The integration works great. We use Satellite for patching our RHEL servers and we use Ansible to automate the patching and deployment of config files. That means we don't have to worry that much about the patching. If we want to deploy the same config file to 100 systems, we just run the playbook with Ansible and it's done. We don't have to run it on 100 servers.

The most valuable thing for us is the support that we get from Red Hat for the product. One of our most important applications here in the City of Gothenburg runs on RHEL, so if something happens, we have a partner to get support from.

The solution has features that simplify adoption for non-Linux users. There is an interface that you can activate on RHEL systems, and on other Linux systems as well, so that you will get a graphical user interface instead of just a shell. It's easier for an administrator who is used to only working on Windows.

In terms of the deployment and management interfaces for non-Linux users and Linux beginners, for me it was quite easy to get on with Linux and RHEL. And if you're not using the Cockpit, or graphical interface, then it's a bit harder because then you have to type in everything and you don't get any visual guides. On the RHEL systems that we have, we haven't been using the desktop environment; we only just use the shell environment. But using Cockpit is much easier because then you get a visual, graphical interface.

Sometimes they don't have new versions for applications like Apache or PHP. I understand it's because they have to have support for them, so they can't have the latest version all the time, but that's the main thing I see that could be improved.

So when you use RHEL and you want to install, let's say, Apache or PHP, you do a "dnf install php" and you get a specific version that Red Hat releases. But that isn't the latest version that PHP has released, because Red Hat has to make sure that they can support it. The compatibility with the latest version of Apache or PHP lags because RHEL does not release updates of the latest versions.

It's the same with the kernel. Sometimes they are a bit behind in the kernel version. That's the same issue. They have to test it and support it for so many years so that's why they are a bit behind on the kernel as well.

We've been using Red Hat Linux (RHEL) for more than 10 years. We are using versions 6, 7, and 8.

It's a really stable operating system. It has a lifetime of about ten years per version. It's not like other Linux systems where the lifetime is about five years. It's stable and it runs for a long time so you don't have to change the operating system that often.

It's easy to scale up and scale out.

Of the people using our RHEL systems, some are system administrators and some of them are just consuming power or memory or CPU from the server. They only have websites and they don't come into contact with the underlying operating system.

RHEL accounts for about 10 to 15 percent of our servers. Our usage increases all the time.

The solution also enables you to deploy current applications and emerging workloads across bare-metal, virtualized, hybrid cloud, and multi cloud environments. We only use on-premise in our infrastructure, but you can have it on bare-metal or on cloud or multi cloud. For us, it's been running great. It's reliable.

Red Hat's technical support has been quite good. Sometimes the lead times are a bit long because most of the support is in India, it seems, so there is a time difference. But if we need to get a higher level of support, we can just bump up the priority. So that's really good. We will get help faster.

I don't think our company had a similar solution before RHEL, although that was back before I started with the company. The company started with RHEL because they wanted to have support.

Red Hat, as a company, is a big contributor to the open-source community. That's another one of the reasons that we want to use RHEL the product.

The setup was quite straightforward. It was a bit harder with the latest version, but that was because of our VMware version.

For us, deployment takes about 15 to 20 minutes. Most of the time we get someone who orders it. They want to have a website and they need a server and we will spin up a RHEL server for them in our VMware infrastructure.

For deployment and maintenance there are two of us in the company. I'm one of them, in my role as a systems analyst, and my colleague is an IT strategist, although he mainly works as a system admin as well.

In terms of the solution’s single subscription and install repository for all types of systems, we can have as many RHEL installations as we want because we have a specific subscription that entitles us to have as many RHEL services as we want. We pay for a subscription and with that we get RHEL and Satellite as well.

The best thing to do is to go to developers.redhat.com and get free subscriptions for RHEL products, so you can try them out and see how they work before you go ahead and purchase or subscribe.

As far as I know, there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We have Ubuntu, CentOS, and other types of Linux versions. The main difference between these products and RHEL is the support that we get from Red Hat. RHEL is also more capable and more stable and it is more of a well-tested operating system before it gets released.

Try the product out. If you decide to purchase a subscription, don't be afraid to submit a ticket or a support case to Red Hat, because that's why you pay for a subscription. It took us a  long time before we started to open support cases, because we thought, "Ah, we can fix this ourselves." But now we use the support system quite often and it works quite well.

One of the things I've learned from using RHEL is that there are applications that work so much better on Linux than they do on Windows.

We need to build a lockdown version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux to build our application on top.

It gives us a stable and secure platform on top of which we can build our applications.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. It allows us to do better application isolation using containers. If I want to take a program that runs on my system and put it in its own network namespace, I can put it in a container. I can put a physical interface in with it and run them together in that container.

It definitely makes it easy to go back and look at all the Open CVEs and things like that.

It works well for us in terms of the portability of applications and containers for keeping our organization agile. We are able to do the kind of things we need to do. We are able to modify the system to do whatever we need to do to get where we want to go.

Things like packaging and the stability you get from things being downstream are valuable. A lot of times, upgrades are more security-based and not feature-based, so things do not break API-wise as we go forward a lot of times.

I feel like it is going all over the place now. Sometimes it is hard to figure out what is going on. I would like more guidance.

We definitely spend a lot of time developing on top of things, but I am not sure what on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux side can be better.

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

It is very stable.

It is very scalable. I would rate it a ten out of ten for scalability.

It has been great when we needed it. We have not needed a lot of it, but we have had no problems when we needed it. 

Positive

We did not use a similar solution previously. We have only been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

We use it on-premises. We use the ISO installer. We install it via CD ROM on-site.

I was not involved in its initial deployment.

It is the guarantee that we are getting the updates that we could backport into the system and we have a stable system to build on.

We have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux since I have been with the company. They might have evaluated other solutions before I joined.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would ask, "Why?" We plan to stick with Red Hat as far as we see in the future, and we have no plans to change.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not helped us to centralize development. It is not something we are looking to use it for.

We use Red Hat Insights very little. We work mostly in an offline environment. It is hard to use Red Hat Insights in an offline environment.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the underlying licensing system that our third-party tool uses. It offers convenience. We can open a case when we want to escalate anything. 

The tool's insights included with licensing is good. Security patching is also a good feature for us.

I don't like the UI changes that come with different versions. 

The tool's support is good. Sometimes, support comes from India. I try to wait and ensure remote support is from the US so that it fits the timeline. 

Positive

The product's deployment is straightforward. 

We are a big data shop that has around 700-800 nodes.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Leapp was very helpful. It is very easy to use. 

Our servers run for 500 days, and we reboot them every 600 days. 

I search through Red Hat Enterprise Linux's knowledge base daily. 

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.6 since the third-party tool is compatible with it. 

We use satellites for the operating system and Ansible to do the configuration. 

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linunx's most valuable feature is patching. 

I am not happy with Red Hat's support. It is difficult to find knowledgeable people. It's hard to troubleshoot. 

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linunx since 2009. 

We used Solaris before Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Solaris' environment is closed, while Red Hat Enterprise Linunx is open-source. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linunx's knowledge base is good, and you can find answers there. 

I rate the product a nine out of ten. 

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.