Our use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) involve a lot of infrastructure; we run Ansible on it, and we run any other containerized utilities we're using on Podman. We run OpenShift as well, so I don't think we have any RHEL workloads on there, but we definitely use RHEL for a lot of our internal infrastructure.

The Podman feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is very valuable; that's probably the core of it—just a simple containerized solution that allows us to stand it up in a server really quickly. This feature and other features benefit our company since we are able to quickly deploy containers to support our infrastructure with minimal management needs from our engineering team. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps us solve pain points such as automation, as well as supporting other file servers using NFS and other kinds of development workloads we're running on it.

My experience with RHEL has not been too complicated; most of our stuff is on RHEL 9 now. A lot of times, our security team comes to us for some of the patching and upgrades, so we're following their lead, however, it hasn't been too difficult for us. We manage our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for provisioning and patching using Ansible and Terraform a lot, so we've been happy with that management experience.

My assessment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s built-in security features is that using SC Linux is helpful for us to lock things down, and our security team is pretty happy with it whenever they're doing their vulnerability scans. From a security standpoint, we're happy with it.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risk. If there ever is a problem, it's quick to stand up a replacement system.

It's pretty lightweight, so I'd much rather deal with a RHEL system any day versus a Windows system. If you compare it to a Windows system, which has a much bigger attack surface, there's a big reduction there.

When it comes to our security team having to scan for vulnerabilities and such, there is a lot less vulnerability scanning that needs to be done, so it's been a better fit for us for our infrastructure.

I am interested to see how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved. It can be improved overall. Specifically, I'm interested in seeing some of the image incorporation with RHEL 10, as that might improve some of our upgrades and help in moving to the newer versions. I'm eager to learn more about that.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in my company for ten-plus years.

It has been very reliable and stable; I have not had any major crashes or outages with RHEL.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales very well with the growing needs of our company, as we can spin up instances quickly whenever we add new environments or data centers.

I have been pretty pleased with the customer service and technical support; it's infrequent that we have to engage support, but when we do, they've been responsive and we've gotten some answers, so we've been happy. I would rate the customer service and technical support as eight out of 10.

Positive

We have considered other solutions before or while using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). We've considered other Linux distros in the past, however, the ability to have a fully supported platform allows us to reach out to support from Red Hat if needed, which is the reason why we've stuck with Red Hat versus others.

In terms of deployment, it's been good standing it up and then maintaining it with patching through Satellite. Upgrades have been not time-impacted. They're pretty quick to get patching done. Everything is pretty easy. Migrations aren't too complicated. 

The biggest return on investment for me when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is certainly the ease of use for the engineering team; they can get things done without taking a lot of their time.

My experience with the pricing, setup cost, and licensing of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform has been pleasing; it's pretty straightforward and we haven't had any major concerns with costs on it compared to others, so we've been happy.

Currently, we don't have any upgrade or migration plans to stay current with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) as far as moving to RHEL 10; that's going to be coming, I'm sure. Most of it involves keeping on the latest versions, and sometimes it's just a driver for keeping Podman up to date whenever Ansible needs to run, as Ansible is core for us.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an eight out of ten overall. 

What could make it a ten comes down to us being able to have time to dig into some of the features we're not using, so it's probably just on us to get wowed by some of the stuff we're not doing today. 

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include working with applications such as Middleware and databases to provide services to different technologies, including Middleware, databases, and applications such as SAP, while managing these in my company.

The innovation benefits my company by providing good support through Insights, which offers comprehensive vulnerability scanning.

What I appreciate the most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the innovation; it constantly drives the need to go faster. 

The TAM support is excellent with weekly meetings where the representative has extensive knowledge, allowing us to resolve all questions. 

The software consistently releases new versions with features and ensures stability compared to other systems, such as Ubuntu.

We have reduced downtime issues from patching by 30% over the past year, thanks to our TAM who provided a testing site where we can check patching in our test environment first, allowing us to find any issues before they reach production and thereby minimizing impact.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points due to their good support team, which usually has quick access to information, resulting in minimal downtime when problems arise. You only need to call, and they can provide a solution, often found in the Knowledge Base on the internet and web page.

I am not sure how Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved.

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

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales effectively with the growing needs of my company due to our global contract, which allows for more VMs than we initially anticipated, ensuring we receive the necessary licenses.

My experience with Red Hat's technical support and customer service is positive; they have good support, always trying to find solutions and understanding my requirements, which is important for me.

Positive

In the past, we considered other Linux OS solutions, specifically demoing with Canonical, however, it was not suitable for us.

I find the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) easy. We automate everything in one pipeline, so you only need to execute that pipeline and in a few minutes, you have your new server.

From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the meantime to repair issues; with good support, our downtime is practically nothing, which is a significant return for us.

The innovation benefits my company by providing good support through Insights, which offers a good scan of vulnerabilities, and the TAM support is excellent with weekly meetings where the representative has extensive knowledge, allowing us to resolve all questions. 

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) eight out of ten.

To achieve a perfect score, we need more focus on version management.

My main use cases are related to Ansible, mostly involving software automation, software installation automation, and data collection.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has less overhead compared to other operating systems for my company. The command line interface is much easier to use—there's not as much navigating around screens. The command line interface is much easier to instruct and manage in that sense.

There's less overhead than using Microsoft products in general, as is the case with the Linux operating systems. I enjoy the command line interfaces a lot more than the UI. For me, that's a plus, but it's also nice to have the GUI interface on top of that if I need to.

The seamless integration with Ansible is always a plus. I can just get it running. Podman, as well, is valuable. Having it just there and ready to use is such a quality of life increase. I don't have to mess around with dependencies. 

It's been good and reliable. I haven't dealt with it much, but I would say Podman and containerization could use a little more work, although I don't know exactly how that would proceed. 

The UI could use a little bit of work. The graphical interface could be improved. I'm not too big of a fan of it right now, but some of that can be customized. Right out of the box, I'm not the biggest fan of how it looks, but that's personal.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for about two years now. I've been dabbling in it on and off. I started with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and went all the way up to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 most recently.

It's very reliable. It's fairly robust. I haven't had many issues with it.

I haven't had any issues with customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Their customer service has been great.

Positive

It's seamless. When it comes to managing my Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems, I most often do manual patching, and it's not any more challenging than any other system I've dealt with, so it's standard in that sense. 

For me, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is ease of use and quality of life.

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

We deploy it. We are a Red Hat partner and have been for 20 years. We help customers with all sorts of day-to-day Linux operations, and Red Hat is one of our partners for Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the platform being used for running applications. Customers often have some sort of applications they need to run, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has been the go-to standard for running applications that need to run on top of Linux for many years.

The feature I appreciate the most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is its long lifecycle. The long lifecycle helps my company by allowing us to plan ahead; we don't have to redeploy everything every five years or so. It helps to plan ahead.

The support can be better. 

Satellite 5 was great at what it did. Satellite 6 is still a mismatch of different things. It's not really the optimal solution for many things yet. I hope they will release a new version soon that fixes this. I know it's been planned for three or four years, possibly five years.

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

The stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are very good, even according to what my customers say. We have had very few bugs where the actual operating system was to blame for any problems. There might have been one or two bugs that I could name that influenced our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) running. It is quite bug-free. It's not perfect, but usually bugs are fixed if you raise a support case.

I don't think I've ever seen downtime caused by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I'm not sure if we have had any less downtime compared to other Linux distributions. We also see a lot of Ubuntu, and I don't see any less downtime on Red Hat than on other community Linux subscriptions.

Our use of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) internally is quite limited. We have some customers who run thousands of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) instances. It scales perfectly fine.

Their support isn't great, but it's good. It varies significantly depending on who you get hold of. It can be quite hard to get to someone who is actually able to answer the questions. We see instances where we have done all of the debugging ahead, but still are asked questions that we have already answered when we created the support ticket. We have to start all over again and use the first two or three days explaining exactly what we do, even though we have already written it. I have done this and they say, 'Have you done this?' And I respond, 'We have done that. We also wrote it when we created the case.' It can be difficult when the supporters don't always read what you have actually tried ahead of creating the support ticket.

Neutral

We also work with SUSE. The main differences between SUSE and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) currently seem to be very political. Red Hat is an American company, and we are based in Europe, so we see that come up frequently.

It's easy to deploy. When it comes to managing the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for provisioning and patching, I see one of two things normally. We have many customers who just do cloning, having a golden template which they clone and then create new VMs from that. We also have many customers who use Satellite. Those are the two methods we see at scale.

I have been involved in upgrades or migrations of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for 20 years. The process of migration just works.

Our upgrade or migration plans to stay current involve knowing the lifecycle for a specific version. It's just a matter of planning ahead. The long lifecycle and predetermined lifecycle of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) make it easy.

The major cost of maintaining Linux is when you have to do reinstallations and upgrades. Having a long lifecycle really reduces the cost of maintaining an operating system. A long lifecycle is key to having a good return on investment.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an eight out of ten.

Our main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are running application servers, specifically database servers, and caching servers for our applications.

Many features benefit my company by ensuring the uptime is really great.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps us solve pain points. It is much more configurable, increases our performance, allows us more flexibility in management, and the automation for it is much greater. 

It is very stable.  

Flexibility and ease of use are great. I'm very familiar with it and I have a good team. It allows us to manage it with very little downtime. 

When we switched from Windows to Linux, we got about an instant 20% increase in performance, which was a very big deal. 

My favorite feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the way the disk management works. I appreciate the fact that it's all text-based.

My assessment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux's (RHEL) built-in security features is that the security is fine.

All of our systems are internal, so a breach would have to go through firewalls and other protections before reaching the system. We do patch them regularly and scan them for vulnerabilities, running the ADE product on them among others.

The improvements for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I suggest are mainly around increasing reporting on how patches are applied as it all revolves around Satellite. Any product that Red Hat is developing to help with patch management would be awesome, and that's my biggest pain point. I would like to see better reporting on automated jobs, and once Red Hat Insights gets looped to Satellite and on-prem, I'd like to be able to take advantage of that.

At this company, we've been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for six years. I have personally been using it for 15 to 20 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has definitely helped to mitigate downtime and lower risks. As far as I know, we've not had a service outage with Red Hat in six years. We've had system outages if all systems fail, since we produce a high availability setup, Red Hat has been very stable, and there's been no unplanned downtime.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales with the growing needs of my company very well, as we've been able to maintain our footprint with an increase in performance. This allows us to actually do more work with the same amount of resources.

I haven't had to open very many cases with customer service and technical support. The documentation is excellent, and the few cases I've had were solved within a few minutes, with one exception regarding NFS, which wasn't their fault. 

I would rate the customer service and technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We switched from Windows to Linux.

Deploying is very easy. We run everything via virtual machines. We create a Red Hat template, and then we use Ansible to configure it from there. So we have a generic template we deploy and actually give the machine an identity to use Ansible. I can deploy a system from start to finish in about an hour.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the ability to get an increase in performance, which allows us to not have to scale our hardware so fast.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that we get a very good deal through our third-party VAR or reseller.

I don't deal much with the pricing. I do know the price of some things, such as the AP platform, which allows us to migrate off other solutions that are substantially higher.

I have considered other solutions apart from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), specifically evaluating Oracle Linux in the beginning. Between the price considerations, as they claim to be bug-for-bug compatible, it's questionable, however, the price of Red Hat Enterprise Linux was substantially lower than Oracle's, even though they claim it's free.

We generally don't use SELinux since it causes more problems for us than it solves. 

I actually recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to everybody. It's a solid product, and I stake my reputation on it. 

If anybody wants to learn Ansible next year, this is a good platform to use. 

Our upgrade or migration plans to stay current include rolling out Red Hat 10 as soon as it's available and once we get an antivirus product that's supported on Red Hat 10. My thought is that we'll probably try to test Image Mode to see if that works for us, as it may simplify our monthly process to keep things in sync. 

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

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are for work and business-critical applications.

My company benefits from these features as our systems must remain operational. When systems go down, it results in significant monetary losses per hour, so having RHEL running and security patches available quicker than other distributions is crucial for maintaining satisfaction.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points. It's a good server operating system, better than all the alternatives, with full support and stability whereas many other Linux distros may be more flighty and not as stable. 

It's more reliable, more stable, and doesn't break down. Stability is the feature of RHEL that I appreciate the most since systems remain operational without rebuilds. Security and stability are definitely important aspects.

We manage our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for provisioning and patching using Red Hat Satellite for patch management, which is acceptable but could use some modernization, and we also use Ansible for configuration management. I'd prefer to see those two tools work better together, and if we could use configuration as code for Red Hat Satellite, it would make it even better.

I have been involved in RHEL upgrades and migrations in general. The process typically involves rebuilding and migrating; we rebuild the OS and migrate. We have tried the upgrade-in-place method, but it can be very lengthy and has more room for errors. Generally, we build new and migrate over first, and if we can't do that, we'll do the upgrade-in-place for applications that people understand, really just needing the same setup as before.

I would suggest to RHEL to maintain vigilance on vulnerabilities and resolve them more quickly. People compare other operating systems based on vulnerabilities. I know that RHEL is stable, but other teams might look at the overall vulnerability counts. Maintaining performance is also important; RHEL has very good performance, so maintaining those fundamentals is crucial as that's what people sometimes seek.

To make it a perfect ten, I would suggest there is always room for improvement; reducing the frequency of changes would help. There are always significant changes, such as with SystemD, and I understand that's more of the community driving much of this change. Other changes are coming through, such as changing command names. Maintaining backwards compatibility would help turn a nine, which is already very good, into a ten.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for approximately 12 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is stable and secure; these are the two biggest factors that drive our usage.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales very with the growing needs of my company. It can natively handle however many servers we need to deploy. 

We can manage anything we need to do, and now that we can do it all as code, that enables scaling. RHEL natively works very with code, and everyone that manages Linux in our company does it either through command line or code, which differs from the Windows experience and helps us scale.

The customer service and technical support of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is good. That said, it depends on who you get and how they understand our problems. Sometimes our problems are simple and sometimes very complex. Generally, we're able to get our issues resolved with minimal intervention or administrative burden.

We consider other solutions while using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and we're constantly looking at other vendors. Their products aren't as good; they might be less expensive, however, they aren't as fully developed.

Cloud licensing is confusing. We have subscriptions available to us, which is why we opted for bring-your-own-subscription. However, even then, the options make deployment difficult since we need to ensure the OS is registered to our satellite system for subscription management, not through the cloud services.

We decided to bring our subscription instead of purchasing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on AWS Marketplace.

From my perspective, the biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is its stability and support, with stability being a core fundamental.

My experience with pricing and setup costs indicates that licensing is confusing in the cloud. We have subscriptions available to us, which is why we opted for bring-your-own-subscription.

Some other solutions we consider include Canonical and Ubuntu, which sometimes perform better in the desktop world since they have support for desktop distributions. SUSE is another option we consider; those are the big three, and we wouldn't consider anything outside of that group extensively.

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

My main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is application servers, and it's all of our VMs. Most, if not all, of our physicals, on the Linux side, are Red Hat. The only thing that we run that isn't Red Hat is our Kubernetes nodes.

The feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I find most interesting is image mode, which has ramifications far beyond just upgrading the OS. Speed to market and zero day could really be accelerated leveraging it. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) benefits my company at the end of the day by providing the foundation of Red Hat Linux, over 20 years and more. Coupled with the backing of a company such as IBM, you've got a company that can help solve pretty much any problem. 

It's the flexibility, almost the one-stop-shop nature, that Red Hat provides, that really creates an administrative-friendly environment.

The package manager is pretty solid now with DNF, which is the industry standard.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps solve quite a few pain points; I would say that in RHEL 8 to RHEL 9, when they went to AppStreams, it really helped simplify the repository structure and made package management significantly easier.

I wasn't part of the discussion about whether security requirements were a consideration in choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for our cloud operations, however, my guess is that it had to do with being able to do configuration management across on-prem and cloud in the same manner in both environments.

We manage our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems through Red Hat Satellite, which we do not use to provision but only to patch, while provisioning is done through vRealize Automation. That's how we provision all of our VMs and custom builds, though there is additional infrastructure behind that.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) supports our hybrid cloud strategy as we are currently in the process of investigating different VM hypervisors, and as that investigation goes on, OpenShift is definitely at the forefront of the things we are looking at.

My number one request for improvement would be better Kickstart functionality, as I feel the Kickstart notation is outdated and it's not programmatic, so that would be my focus point, based on what I do.

From my perspective, I would prefer to see more of the knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) be freely available and not tied behind a Red Hat account, as there's a lot of common knowledge content that would be really helpful to many people. Now, I have a Red Hat account, so it doesn't matter to me. Still, that would be a great show of faith on Red Hat's part to open up many of those knowledge articles and make them freely available.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for probably 12 years.

My thoughts on the stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are quite positive; my stuff doesn't go down, so I don't have problems. 

It's one of those nice things, similar to your refrigerator—you don't notice it until it breaks. It just works, and that's really the key factor; I can't remember the last time we had a system go down and had to restore it due to a bad patch. Those things just don't happen. The way they have things set up with Fedora, CentOS, and all of that user testing and integrated testing feeds into a really good final product, one that's stable and that you can rely on.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales with the growing needs of my company effectively, as we are currently running approximately 11,000 Red Hat VMs, and we manage, patch, and do everything all the time without issue. 

I've seen a significant decrease over my twenty-ish year career of needing backup tools to restore files since files just don't get corrupted the same way that they used to, making me feel Red Hat has really kept up to date with all of the intricacies and small components of the OS to provide a great ecosystem.

I cannot speak to the customer service and technical support of the platform, as I don't have to open tickets; there's a whole other team that does that. My understanding is that we have a regular cadence with our Technical Account Manager once every other week or once a month, and we've had good successes to the best of my knowledge.

Positive

While working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we actually considered other solutions, specifically SUSE Enterprise Linux, which we were running for quite some time until their pricing model changed. Red Hat offered a better pricing model, a more mature product, and it was just overall better in my opinion.

I have been involved in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) upgrades and migrations in my company, and it depends on what your approach is, however, we don't do in-place upgrades, as they're just dangerous, no matter what anybody says.

I always say a fresh install is always the best thing, so for us, it's a matter of leveraging Kickstart and Packer to generate the VM images or Kickstart to generate ISOs and install them on physicals. It's just a matter of taking and being able to easily set it up for repeatability, although it takes probably more time than I would prefer to get that consistency.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for me is its close coupling with Ansible, which I am a big fan of. I've been here since the beginning, and Ansible is a great marrying tool with RHEL to really manage those systems at scale, allowing me to do pretty much anything, which I do every day; it's awesome.

Assuming you can leverage virtual data center licensing, I don't see the costs as being terrible. There are a lot of viable ways to decrease those costs while increasing the value you get from RHEL by leveraging CentOS and lower environments. 

Overall, I don't end up having to write the check at the end of the day, however, I've heard that the licensing models have changed a bit since I've had to work with them directly and that they're less painful than they had been before, with a lot of moving licenses from one pool to another pool, which I've heard you don't have to do now, so that's nice.

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and eight out of ten.

Our main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) currently involve general server workload, including numerous Oracle-based workloads.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I appreciate the most include the most recent iterations such as no-downtime patching, live patching, and the ability to snapshot or snapshot LVM's; these features are more of a Linux capability, however, they have been really beneficial to us. 

High availability has been extremely beneficial for us to support. These features benefit our company by providing less downtime. We are not taking downtime to do patching on tier-one systems, and we spend less manpower and time to perform the types of automation and management that would normally take considerable time to accomplish hands-on, resulting in significant time savings.

Security requirements are always a consideration in choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the cloud. Anytime we make any decision, security is definitely one of the foremost considerations we have taken place.

The biggest thing we look for is the ability to abide by STIG, as we do, and then apply our NIST policies as well as our defined HIPAA policies; Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) makes that a really easy process through the automation aspects.

We manage our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for provisioning and patching using a combination of VMware vRealize for actual deployment, and then we use Ansible Automation for the day-two configuration and lifecycle. Once software deployments and configurations are all Ansible automation, it couldn't work any better for us. As long as you have a coding background and understand YAML, Ansible works fantastically.

If I had to suggest one improvement for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), it would be clearer licensing information. There could be easier licensing paths for Red Hat; currently, it's included with many different things, yet just more clearly defined skews would help. That's the main consideration.

We have used Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for a total of about a decade now.

Regarding stability and reliability, our experience is that we don't have to reboot our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers as we do with Windows servers every 90 days for something bad. 

We only have to reboot our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers for updates or some unusual code push. We can count on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) just as we can count on Cisco UCS.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales fantastically with the growing needs of our company. We have clustered our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) servers, and as far as size, they far outweigh anything else in the environment. 

Our largest clusters run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), and we continue to see that as we grow, it is able to grow with us.

I would evaluate the customer service and technical support of this solution as being excellent when we need them. 

The information in the knowledge base is so readily available that we don't very often have to contact customer service, however, when we do, they are generally very knowledgeable and well-versed in our size.

Positive

Before we chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the first time, we were mostly using Windows. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) was really our first enterprise Linux that we brought into the environment under the enterprise scale.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the manpower; it's the ability to automate significant management tasks. That is the biggest ROI on the amount of time we spend managing this system, as we can take that time back and dedicate it to other types of innovation.

My experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been pretty consistent, and honestly, compared to the rest of the market, it's pretty fair.

We've certainly considered other solutions before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), including open source; we do use a bit of open source such as Rocky Linux, which most are going to be Red Hat derivatives. We also looked into other options, however, for anything tier one or most tier two, our current tier-one environment is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). From a stability and supportability standpoint, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a clear winner.

Currently, I can't say that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) necessarily supports our hybrid cloud strategy; what it does do is make the deployment of several deployments and conception models much easier for us to consider versus having to do custom imaging for our cloud presence. 

It helps us bring down the amount of time it takes us to deploy.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an 8.

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.

Our main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include our shift from VMware Tanzu container platform to OpenShift container platform about three to four years ago. We are also starting to use the Ansible platform to automate some networking.

One of the main benefits was that we were able to integrate with Github and minimize deployment to minutes versus days. 

The feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I find most valuable is the Ansible automation platform, which is very user-intuitive, and there is abundant documentation and guidance available. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps us resolve many automation issues that we are facing now, as we attempt to automate setups and restore through Git and integrate with GitOps. It is working for us, and we are still in the deployment phase. We have been working closely with Red Hat, and it has been effective.

Currently, I don't have any specific improvements in mind for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). One of the tools I'm examining is the automation platform, and it appears there is still room for improvement since it is relatively new. Red Hat is working on this, and it will improve, though there are some bugs present. 

To make Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) a perfect ten, improvements could come from newer features and software additions, such as Ansible. They are transitioning from Galaxy to the automation platform, which is new and has some issues, but this is expected. As the platform matures, it will continue to improve.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for approximately three to four years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is very stable. We have been running it for approximately three to four years as our main container platform, and support is excellent. We can get people on the phone, and the response time is great. We haven't had to address any major issues.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales excellently with the growing needs of my company. It is easy to scale. With our OpenShift platform, downtime is close to zero when it comes to upgrades or scaling, and it is very easy for us, especially when integrating with GitHub.

The customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are very responsive. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We are deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on-premises. I have been involved in many Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) upgrades or migrations to on-premises, and it is straightforward. The documentation and how-to guides make it very simple.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from a technical perspective is minimal downtime for end users.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is superior to other solutions I've used in the past, such as VMware, primarily due to cost savings, which was our main reason for migrating.

When managing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems regarding provisioning and patching, we use a cluster environment, so everything is cluster-based, and we use GitHub to perform upgrades and patches almost seamlessly with no downtime. 

Our upgrade and migration plans to stay current with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) involve upgrading our clusters. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped us to mitigate downtime and lower risk with zero downtime achievement. 

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) an eight out of ten overall, as I am still relatively new to it on an enterprise level, having previously worked on standalone systems.