Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Reviews

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) involve a custom Linux security module, and I use RHEL as my upstream and repackage it as my own distro.

To navigate my security risks, I use features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) such as Satellite, Ansible, IPA, or IDM, and I also perform STIGging with a lot of my requirements coming from the government telling me to ensure I have all these things done. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) makes it easy to do that, with the biggest thing being their documentation because I can find any question I type into Google and find a Red Hat link, log in, and see it.

I use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on-premise.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points because it's open source, so it's easy to modify, and there's the support that I need, especially since I work with the public sector a lot where they want support provided, updates, and patches on CVEs almost immediately after a zero-day is released, and that's the big thing that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me with.

What I appreciate most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that they're open source, and I take what they have and repackage it. I appreciate RPMs, Mock, and a lot of the tooling that's in that community, in the Fedora world, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) makes it easy to get to and work with.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is something I love, and it's very helpful. That is probably the most useful part of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved by getting more upstream packages from Fedora because they don't have enough packages, and it's problematic that I have to maintain a separate repo from what comes from Fedora. I don't understand why Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) doesn't package it as the base, as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) only has a subset of packages from upstream.

The desktop environment is another area that needs significant improvement because it is barely usable and meets just the bare minimum of what's needed. There are people from Red Hat giving presentations on Windows, Macs, and other distros, which to me would be embarrassing. If I was the CEO of Red Hat and my employees aren't using our own product, that should be a major red flag. Why would you present to customers of all people? Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is great as a server operating system distribution and the support is the number one thing that makes Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) stand out, but it really falls short as a client workstation.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I've had servers run for three years straight without crashing, so Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is very reliable.

In terms of scalability, I get a lot of complaints from customers, and when I start getting a lot of machines running, I start to see problems in production, which my customers experience as well, so then I'm supporting it. I don't know how much to blame Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for that, but it does seem to become a headache once it gets larger.

I evaluate customer service and technical support from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as pretty good.

Prior to adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I was using another solution, specifically Solaris as my upstream. I think when Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6 dropped, I switched from Solaris to Linux, and it was Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as the solution because of the support.

The deployment process of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been straightforward and easy for me.

I am probably not considering switching to another product while using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I have tried neither Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Image Builder nor system roles, and I'm not a big fan of them because they're not part of my use case. They are useful in a sense for reproducibility if I'm going to create a golden image and deploy it, but that's not really my use case.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped me to mitigate downtime and lower risks.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is great on the server side and not as strong on the client side, with the workstation and desktop environment needing a lot of work. As far as adopting it, if you're willing to pay for all the licensing, then go for it because you'll get the support you want. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) overall as a seven or eight.

I mainly use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as a financial application.

I appreciate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for its stable product and good support. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points through automation with tools such as Ansible. It helps mitigate downtime and lower risk because you can recover.

Regarding security requirements from my side, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is somewhat satisfactory, but in most organizations, they are asking for more enterprise solutions for security. If Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can invest in monitoring, it would be great. For example, Instana is an IBM product, and since IBM owns Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), if they invest in Instana, it will be a great improvement.

I have been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for more than five years.

For Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) stability, I rate it a nine. It is really stable, with no issues. I found one server running for more than two years without any issue.

For scalability, it depends on the hypervisor you're using, and if you have a template, you can clone it. It doesn't matter which OS you are using, even in the cloud, it's the platform that can scale.

I am satisfied with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s knowledge base. They have one of the best knowledge bases for their products with good documentation and articles that help solve issues without needing to open a case.

The initial setup for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is simple.

I don't think Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is saving money because it is expensive, but saving time is a benefit because they have a lot of automation and good documentation, and it is a stable product.

I can say about pricing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is maybe a two on a scale where ten is a high price.

I think of Ubuntu and SUSE Linux as the top in my mind competitors to RHEL.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can run anywhere, everywhere, so it is easy to run on any platform. On RHEL, it is a more general OS, so I don't know if there's a particular feature to consider.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps mitigate downtime and lower risk because you can recover, but upgrades require downtime. We mostly do in-place upgrades and haven't used migration much.

We are involved in upgrading RHEL 7 because it has reached end of life; sometimes we upgrade to eight or nine. I am already a Red Hat Accelerator and a reference.

Overall, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) eight to nine out of ten.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include database, Java applications, programming, and Python. We were interested in using AI workloads with RHEL last year but then realized the hardware cost was not going to permit us to manage that.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points such as having nicely packaged dependencies, so when we need to install dependencies, we can easily rely on Satellite to be able to get the packages from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to be able to then install without needing to track down everything that we need. This is more reliable and having the security of Red Hat verifying things is better.

DNF helps my company because Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Satellite has all the packages there, allowing us to patch our systems relatively easily and install any applications through the Yum repository makes it much easier than before.

Satellite helps navigate our security risks by providing us a dashboard of what systems we have, what their patch levels are, and where we need to go with them. It's a good dashboard to monitor. All the CVEs coming in from Red Hat are what we rely on. When Red Hat provides a CVE, we know it's safe to install it.

Satellite is very good in helping to identify quickly what we need, who's wanting what packages, and verify and go forward. It's a nice product to have.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could be improved by including in-place upgrades, allowing us to go from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 9 to 10 on certain hosts, such as database hosts, instead of needing to build a new system and then transferring the data, which would be a better way of improving it.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for 20 years.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues; it has been rock solid for us.

In terms of scalability, we grow our servers size-wise, both horizontally and vertically, so I have no issues.

The customer service and technical support I receive are really good.

Prior to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) at my company, I was using Amazon VMs at different companies, along with CentOS and Fedora. With Red Hat, I get the benefit of a company behind me that can support me, and if I run into an issue, they have the resources to figure it out and address it.

The deployment process of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) really depends on your environment because if you have VMware, you have one way of doing it, and if you have Nutanix, you have another way of deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). We use Ansible to deploy, so we just have to configure it for the environment that we're using.

We did a major version upgrade with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and Ansible Automation Platform, going from 8 to 9, where we basically rebuilt new hosts and reinstalled on the new hosts, with a few systems we couldn't rebuild, so we did an in-place upgrade using Leapp. The experience was easy and nice. Tooling-wise, it was nicely done.

The biggest return on investment using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for me is standardization, relying on support and knowing there's a group behind it that can support us no matter what happens. It's easy to open a ticket, and easy for them to get back to us and help resolve issues.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is nice since we have a site license, but I don't know what the prices are.

I did not consider other solutions while using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Overall, I think Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a great product that I enjoy using, and my advice for other companies considering it is that if you have a need for support and are in a situation requiring audit and maintaining a certain level of uptime, having the safety net of Red Hat behind you is important. If you need recovery in minutes and hours, you should go with Red Hat; if you can't recover in less than days, go with something else. I would rate this product a 10 out of 10.

My main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is for the central monitoring of the operations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points by enabling faster transactions and more transactions.The feature I like the most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is its resilience.A huge amount of transactions benefits my organization because we use this cluster to include the performance of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risk.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could be improved with frequent updates.I think frequent upgrades should be included in the next release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

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

I would assess the stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) by stating that it is very secure, reliable, and fast.I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales effectively with the growing needs of my organization.I have not experienced any issues with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I would evaluate customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as good, and we have vendor coordination with them.On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as an eight because it needs the streamlining of things.

Positive

Prior to adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I was using a platform from IBM initially, which was pushed into containerization.

I would describe my experience with deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as not complicated and manageable, and that works well.

I manage my Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems with mass provisioning and patching, and I am very satisfied with the management experience.I managed the expansion on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as well.

I have not really seen an ROI with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that pricing is heavy on this.The setup cost and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) involves a perpetual license.

The other solutions I considered before selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) included open source options.What stood out to me in my evaluation process of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that the main feature is security on top of the open source, and we are considering the open-source platform to be implemented.

The complexity of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) comes from the methodology, which is complex.Security requirements were a consideration in choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).My assessment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s built-in security features is that it is effective when it comes to simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance.My upgrade and migration plans for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to stay current include frequent patching and upgrades annually.I assess the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as good for a few use cases.The factors that led me to consider the change to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) were stability and reliability.I would describe my experience with deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as not complicated and manageable, and that works well.I have no advice to give to other organizations considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I would rate this product a nine overall.

I am working on a Cloud Infra project in which many analytics applications are hosted on Cloud Infra, and their applications are hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The applications are customer-facing and mainly focus on analytics regarding an automotive company.

The experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was pretty smooth, as we can subscribe the servers from the RHEL portal.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on both on-premises and public cloud.

One of the best features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that it is lightweight and it is the industry standard.

Whenever I start the servers, they switch on very fast compared to other Linux servers.

We can deploy clusters in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and we can scale up and scale down our infrastructure with the help of the RHEL server.

The subscription model and vendor support are also good. We can subscribe our servers to RHEL so that we can get the packages installed for our project-related dependencies.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has positively impacted my organization. The speed of the applications has improved after deploying them on RHEL.

Whenever we face an issue and need to reboot the server, it comes up very fast compared to other servers, and it has improved the latency of our applications.

Time has been saved since using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and the application performance has improved after using it.

There should be some automation for patching the servers in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Patching in the sense that automatically, whatever servers we need, we can patch them using a utility present inside RHEL.

It is stable, but compared to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), Ubuntu is more stable for Kubernetes and Docker-related applications. If improvements can be made in RHEL so Docker and Kubernetes-based applications can be deployed more easily, that would be great.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the past six months.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales up very easily, and RHEL vendor support is also good; it has helped us many times.

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from the start; we can see that RHEL provides good vendor support and bug fixes.

Positive

We did not evaluate any other options before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I can see more improvements can be added to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). They provide many certifications such as RHCE and RHCSA which are very important for learning Linux, learning about automation, and deploying the servers in the cloud.

The architect-level certifications are very important. The customer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) rates around an eight.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a great platform to learn Linux. Red Hat provides many certifications such as RHCSA, RHCE, and RHCA, which is architect level.

RHCA is an architect-level certification through which you can learn Ansible and many automation-related activities in Linux; it can help you grow your Linux knowledge as a professional in the IT industry.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an 8.5 out of 10.

It depends on the company environment and client environment. Currently, we are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for application deployment and server management, and sometimes we use it for DB deployment also.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for learning purposes for new things in Red Hat technology.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers a very easy-to-use experience in the Linux environment apart from any other flavors, and it's a very easy, systematic structure that provides easy support from Red Hat if any complex issue arises, which is the best point of RHEL, along with its affordable subscription model.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) saves time, saves money, and it's very easy for automation purposes; we support third-party tools for automation, so it's very beneficial.

I see a return on investment from using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) because patching is very easy; it supports third-party tools such as BMC or BigFix, so it's very time-saving for patching and performing any operation to fetch data from multiple servers.

To improve Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), they have to provide a playground for their OS for free or for some time, or they have to provide OpenShift multitenant clusters for improving skills in Red Hat technologies and in RHEL also, which will be very easy for a growing career in technology and providing support in an organization.

They have to make it easier to raise a ticket for Red Hat. Currently, when we raise a ticket, they show multiple options, so they should provide a direct option for raising the support cases.

They should provide patches on a quarterly basis instead of monthly, as patching every month makes it a burden on us.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since my career started in 2020.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is stable. In my last five years of experience, I haven't encountered any stability issues when everything is done properly.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has good scalability, and with the RHEL OpenShift tool, we use the scale up and scale down features.

Customer support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is very quick and provides support on call. It's easier to get support from RHEL compared to other enterprises such as IBM.

Positive

We did everything manually before Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), but since working with RHEL, we use automation, which saves time and costs.

I am not aware of billing, but for the setup of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it's very easy because we directly get a golden image and replicate to make a new machine, so it can be set up in very little time.

Before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I evaluated other options such as CentOS, Rocky Linux, and Ubuntu. However, RHEL is an enterprise OS that provides multiple features and support, with a very systematic structure.

The Ansible tool is very nice, and currently, they have released OpenShift, which is also a very nice product provided by Red Hat.

I would advise others looking into using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that if they don't have budget issues, they should go for RHEL; otherwise, they can consider AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux, which are also open-source products.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a very nice Linux distribution that provides quick support, and in my last five years in the corporate world, I found it to be a very good OS, but they should lower their charges for mid-scale and startup companies in countries such as India, Bhutan, and Nepal, as they can't afford that much amount in dollars.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a ten.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are for our private cloud, so we deploy it and use RHEL extensively for that. We set up the environment and their applications will run on our environment, and I work in that architecture space where we will set up the environment for our customers to come and deploy their applications.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points with all the integrated tools that it brings to us, including all the Ansible Towers that we exceedingly use. My favorite feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is Ansible as a tool to work on RHEL. The combination of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) reduces the operational overheads and helps keep us autonomous, allowing us to move faster with less time.

AI features in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) would be an improvement because they reduce operational time and help administrators with features such as finding and troubleshooting issues and resolving them automatically.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for about a year.

The stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is, so far, very good.

Regarding scalability, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) keeps up with our demands, so I think it is on par, as we've been partnering for a long time.

I would evaluate the customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as great. From one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as an eight.

Security requirements were definitely a consideration before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The reason security requirements were considered is that it's just part of our bread and butter as a company, and we would not be able to do anything without security.

Currently, we are not in the middle of any migrations or upgrades regarding Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), so it's running what we have right now, and that's what we're focusing on.

I am not directly involved in managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems when it comes to provisioning and patching, but I have teammates who do that, and they seem to have a very good experience.

From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the platform itself; I would say it's a good investment that keeps our job running.

My assessment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s built-in security features is that I have had good experiences so far. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped me to mitigate downtime and lower risks, though the specific details are confidential at this time.

The improvements with AI in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are exciting, as I was attending one of the sessions, and RHEL 10 with AI is already coming. In Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10, I look forward to seeing the AI features they were describing.

I assess the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as pretty good; there is still extensive documentation that I constantly refer to if I get stuck. My advice to any other company that's thinking about choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as their solution is to try it out and find out for yourself. I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) overall as an eight.

Our main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) at our company involve it being our primary operating system for most of our servers. We're about 80% Red Hat Linux, 20% Windows.

The feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) I appreciate the most is the ability to build images from the Red Hat pipeline, which is very effective. 

We also have an on-prem image management system that works really well with Red Hat. These features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) benefit our company since they allow us to perform life cycle tasks faster.

Our upgrade or migration plans to stay current with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that our operating strategy is to put all net new on 8.10, and we are going to stay on 8.10 until 9.10. We typically just stay on the long-term release.

As for how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved, besides being cheaper, I am uncertain. From a technical perspective, everything is addressed, which is part of the reason why we have as many systems as we do. It's probably one of the reasons why we moved away from SUSE Linux all those years ago, and cheaper pricing would definitely be beneficial.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for approximately ten years. I've only been with the company for three years, and Red Hat has been there since before I arrived.

Regarding stability and reliability, we haven't had any issues with Red Hat VMs crashing due to a Red Hat issue.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales with the growing needs of our company quite effectively, as we're still on-prem and a VMware shop, so it functions seamlessly. Many of our applications scale really well, with some having several hundreds of VMs, which we couldn't accomplish on Windows.

The customer service and technical support experience is good. We have many highly qualified senior tenured engineers with Red Hat, so there are very few instances where we need to call somebody for assistance. It's usually account-related or access-related, not normally technical issues.

Historically, we used SUSE Linux before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

Our architecture doesn't get hands-on. We guide and influence, so we have done upgrades over the years. We've done upgrades on upgrades on upgrades over the years. We typically don't do cross-version migrations if we can avoid it. It's a lot cleaner to do migration from major revision to major revision.

From a technical perspective, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that compatibility and supportability are easier to adopt. There's a wider range of things that support it, and it has a larger community for getting support compared to Windows. From a server perspective, it functions better, and there are better capabilities for getting things to work and supporting any issues that might occur.

I'm not involved in the pricing, setup costs, or licensing for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I hear that it's expensive, but everything is getting expensive these days, so I don't think it's Red Hat specific. VMware's kickoff after the Broadcom acquisition has created a catalyst for everybody to increase their prices.

I haven't considered changing to other solutions since CentOS went their own route. For the most part, everything is Red Hat for us. It just depends on the capabilities that determine what version we run. 8.10 is the standard, but before eight, we would have several instances on 7.5, 7.3, depending on the features and capabilities the application needed. If it was just a generic application without special requirements, we usually put them on the latest version.

When it comes to managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems regarding provisioning and patching, we are moving to Ansible. We are on VMware's vRealize operations and orchestration, and we are moving all of our management and deployment strategies to Ansible. We are transitioning to Ansible since we have so many different systems and ecosystems that we need to touch; having one platform rule them all makes it easier for life cycle management and deployment. Ansible allows us to do everything in one seamless pipeline versus having to run five different automations for standing up a VM, standing up storage, and creating firewall rules.

I'm not very familiar with Red Hat Enterprise Linux's (RHEL) built-in security features when it comes to simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance. Cybersecurity requirements are abstracted from us, and they have their own tool suites, but we do have integrations with Red Hat. We use CrowdStrike, Carbon Black, and Rapid7, and all of those tools have integrations or abilities with Red Hat, so we leverage those tools but nothing is necessarily native to Red Hat.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has not helped to mitigate downtime and lower risks any more than any other operating system. The contributing factors of downtime are typically external, whether it's power or networking or storage. In our ecosystem within a Red Hat space, crashes are very infrequent and usually something external.

On a scale from one to ten, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an eight.

I have been a sysadmin handling everything about Red Hat Enterprise Linux, primarily for on-premises environments. I have built projects based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including development and support projects in the companies. I have handled pretty much everything. Anything you can imagine, I have probably done with it.

In terms of security, it does a lot of things that most people still turn off. SELinux is turned on by default. They have pretty good firewall rules in their defaults. The audit rules always take tweaking, but, overall, it comes out of the box not too bad. I used to write scripts to harden them from there.

There are multiple ways to provision and patch. You have everything from local repositories to doing it by hand.

Their knowledge base is incredible. There is so much information out there. It has never taken me longer than 30 minutes to find an answer to anything, even very tough ones.

One company I worked for was a security company, and we did a lot of patching on everything. It was designed around security and email hosting, and uptime was pretty much whatever we wanted it to be. I have had a couple of times when the uptime was bad, but it was caused by a third-party solution. In fact, the Norton antivirus was definitely the worst. Red Hat had nothing to do with it.

I enjoy the patching processes and the way Red Hat Enterprise Linux has elements set up. I have never had a patch session fail, even when installing a thousand packages at a time. 

Their implementation of Yum is effective. I have used it quite a bit to pull additional information out because, for a while, I was doing security work. It is nice to have all the security information they provide on the inside. Their security library is well-maintained. I have used it exclusively for 15 years now, and I have been nothing but happy with it.

I wish IBM would give them more leeway. IBM seems to have restricted Red Hat Enterprise Linux more since the acquisition.

The organization moved away from Red Hat because IBM introduced paywalls and additional barriers that did not exist before, which made everything a lot harder. They moved from there to the Rocky version, which is a fork of Red Hat. It is run by people who have left IBM or Red Hat engineers who left IBM. Giving Red Hat Enterprise Linux more independence could be beneficial.

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

It has demonstrated great stability, with systems running for multiple years without issues. I have no problem with uptime. It is as long as you want it to be.

It offers excellent scalability. The HPC system that the organization runs is a small one, but it has 8,000 computers. Each computer has at least 24 to 72 CPUs in it, and everything runs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Rocky. It is eminently capable. They run jobs because they do some of the hurricane forecasting and things. The things that they run on it take 900 nodes and 70,000 CPUs. You walk into that data center, the air comes out of the floor at 50 degrees. By the time it gets through the computers, it is about 110, so they are working them hard. The room itself stays at about 90.

Before the acquisition by IBM, support was incredible. I could directly engage with developers and get immediate assistance. It was great. 

I have not had a lot of experience with them post-acquisition. At this point, the entire department is moving to Rocky. It is not a huge change for me, but a part of the move was the lack of support through IBM.

Positive

The company we are contacted with has just moved from Red Hat to Rocky, which is Red Hat-based. It is a fork of Red Hat, so it is like all Red Hat derivatives. It is binary compatible. You can do anything you want with it. For the things the organization does with the HPC environment, it is a lot nicer because there are fewer restrictions. Open source works best for HPC environments. You have to recompile a lot of drivers and things to get things to work. Being able to do that is critical in that business.

For the most part, upgrades and migrations are very straightforward. In one of the cases, it was very straightforward to install the OS, but it was a lot more problematic to find all the pieces that ran the underlying hardware and get those working right. We had to do a lot of testing between lots of different versions of both the OS and the hardware drivers before we found good combinations. From what I hear, going from Red Hat to Rocky was a lot cleaner than going from Red Hat 6 to Red Hat 7. That was a big change.

In terms of maintenance, for the most part, once you get it set, you can walk away from it.

I do not have any insights, but I know why the prices went up. At the time, it made sense. I do not know what the pricing is like now. Previously, the pricing model was advantageous as it allowed unlimited installations for a single price, focusing on support. The recent introduction of paywalls complicates the cost landscape.

I have used the web console, but I am more of a command-line person. I did not see a lot of use for it, but I have used it in the HPC world because you can do some things that are handy, such as pulling in entire groups of things and building them as a boot group. It is nice to have when you need it.

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

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that it has been part of our core delivery solutions for many industries, mostly for telecom.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I find most valuable include all of the features since system V. 

In my organization, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) provides an agnostic interface for many storage vendors that we deal with, which helps us to have a wider spectrum of offerings in our consultancy offerings.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved by adopting a feature similar to YaST from a big European competitor, which would significantly enhance Red Hat technologies.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) since 2005 when it was in release four, which makes it 20 years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as favorable, noting that during the last five years, we've experienced fewer crashes and downtimes compared to other commercial Unix and Linux distributions in the market.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales excellently with the growing needs of my organization, and I would rate it ten out of ten.

I evaluate customer service and tech support as excellent; with either the partner portal or customer portal, we receive very good RCAs and analyses for any case we submit to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). On a scale of one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support as ten out of ten.

Positive

Prior to adopting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I was using Commercial Unix, Oracle Solaris. The factor that led me to change was that during the last decades, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has absorbed many features straight from Solaris, enabling us to perform effective migrations from Commercial Unix to RHEL.

At the very beginning, at the earliest versions of Red Hat since version six, there was a kernel that was not compatible with many cluster vendors, and that's why we were adopting another vendor of Linux. However, we've seen that during these past years, Red Hat has been experiencing a lot of enhancements overcoming these kinds of barriers. And now Red Hat has become more versatile in accepting more hardware that allows us to standardize our Red Hat offerings in our consultancy services.

I have seen a return on investment with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). For data points, in one of the key industries I handle, which is telecom, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been one of the key strategic providers offering a good price to implement automation and containerization across all of the network elements we manage with several vendors, and in the latest five years, we have observed a good investment return in terms of ROI.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that I strongly believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) offers a good relationship between value and price, and despite it being quite pricey, it's definitely worth it.

Before selecting Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), I considered SLES, which is a competitor of Red Hat.

My advice to other organizations considering Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is to have a good plan and to establish the relationship as a key strategic reference for any upcoming migration. The partnership and customer support provided is a high-value option. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped mitigate downtime and lower risk through high availability solutions and key features that enable network redundancy, allowing us to achieve this. 

I would assess the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as excellent because it has become one of the key standards in the industry for following guidelines according to any topic in the RHEL environment. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate this solution an eight.