Internally, we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for services and for applications that we run, especially Linux based-applications. We also have SAP solutions, which we sell to the customers as a total solution with Red Hat, SAP HANA, and also for our own cloud-based SAP HANA, which is under Red Hat's operating system.

Red Hat Insights is quite an interesting and valuable feature. Lately, we used the malware scan feature. The Cockpit feature and web interface were quite helpful. We have also begun with OpenSCAP, which used is to harden the operating system's security features.

The first area for improvement is documentation, and I consider it since I have been working in IT for more than twenty-five years. For twenty years, I have been working with open source, and I see that the documentation is lacking, so it needs to do more work on its documentation part. Most open source and upstreams from Red Hat products work from the open source solution and have better documentation than in the actual Red Hat products.

New products need better documentation. The websites also have a single sign-on to get you from one side to the other. As a partner, I had a problem finding out how I needed to connect and to which side of the solution. I consider myself an expert user of the internet and websites, but going from one side to the other, was quite problematic.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud for four to five years at least. My company has a partnership with Red Hat, and so we have our own licensing for the product. We have customers whom we manage, and they purchased the licenses on the go from the cloud provider. We just sold them the managed services. But mostly through us, we should be selling the licenses.

It's a very stable product, and that is actually the reason we are forcing or pushing customers to go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The solution is scalable.

I rate the support a seven out of ten. The support is knowledgeable but slow if we have to get answers.

Neutral

We use Red Hat Satellite for managed services for our customers. And, of course, we use a product of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for servers. We started with OpenShift in the lab at the beginning, but now I'm beginning to produce it for our own services. So, now I can offer these to the customers.

One of the discussions in my company at the beginning of this year was to see if we could test our services on-premises for the virtualization, specifically for the KVM virtualization. But since it was not approved, we'll have to see the next step.

I have worked with other open source distributors. I have worked with SCO-Linux and Unix, which is the base of Linux. I didn't personally make the decision to switch. The company decided to switch since we are partners, and we are focusing on putting in the best efforts in terms of the partnership and customers we have with Red Hat.

The solution is deployed on both on-premises and the cloud. We have customers on the cloud server platform where we run their network, and we manage through Satellite. We also have it on-premises.

I was involved in the deployment of the solution. We created some automation, so the setup phase is straightforward. We use templates for all of those, but to manage the templates, and what it will include, we use external tools to make it easier for the deployment automation.

Regarding deployment time, it can be done in seconds. It also depends on what application we are speaking about since for an OS or more difficult solution, like Red Hat Satellite, you need more time.

I have seen a return on investment, especially considering the time taken to resolve the problem where we bought some support from Red Hat.

Regarding the prices, the new changes are actually not bad as it works for enterprise solutions. But it could have some other options for super solutions for the students in colleges, and they could actually win more customers from that. Of course, we have the test licensing and all that for the partners, where it's very useful for us to be able to test more of the products. But to win more would be much easier for us also if they introduce special pricing for students, universities, governmental institutions and all that. Most probably there is a price for them, but we haven't got that information. Also, Red Hat sometimes goes directly and not through the partner, but I'm not an expert.

I wasn't the one to make a choice, but I think my company evaluated other options, and it was their choice to go with Red Hat.

My company is a private cloud company. Mostly, we have our own private services, providing private cloud services to the customers. But we also provide public clouds like Azure and some Amazon clouds.

Regarding resiliency, it is a good standardized OS with stability. But sometimes, it is a little slow in reaction to problems that might appear. For example, we had this big Java Log4j bug where their reaction was very slow compared to other distributions. Of course, they found the solution when they had it, but it was quite a slow reaction. In general, it's a very stable OS.

Regarding how easy or difficult it is for you to move workloads between the cloud and your data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I don't have any solution for that. I have to migrate it manually right now.

Regarding the cost-saving capability of the solution, I would say that it is possible to save on costs because of the automation we use through Red Hat Satellite for maintenance and how we have managed automation, time to spend on the service, maintenance, test, problems, etc. So, you can say that it's been a cost-saving procedure.

I rate the overall product a seven and a half out of ten.

RHEL is a phenomenal operating system for three primary reasons: 

• Support compared to the rest of the Linux ecosystem
• Cohesive ecosystem 
• Application platform

The combination of these three aspects has proven to me from an advising perspective that it is key in decision-making.  

Our clients purchase the use cases via cloud provider and hyper-scale. It's a combination of both. Mostly, new clients prefer going for hyper scalers. Whereas the clients with Red Hat licenses, predominantly those from the banking sector, transfer the licenses to the cloud depending on their hyper scaler plan.

The main benefits my clients have seen are the supportability, maintenance of the operating system, security, and the ecosystem that ties it all together.

The solution has a phenomenal operating system. Its support features are best compared to the rest of the Linux ecosystem. Generally, applications don't rely on operating systems per se. When combined with the container ecosystem, security is the paramount feature that is most asked for.

The problems our clients try to solve by implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux vary. The main ones include containerization, cloud transformation, and visual transformation in terms of how you get to the cloud in a hybrid mode. The key aspect that I give advice about is how for the operating system in terms of the scalability to bridge the cloud to the on-prem world, so where they could have the OpenShift ecosystem that it runs into and helps them manage both systems together. 

The solution's operating systems are phenomenally resilient and stable. The good part is that Red Hat has backing and support. Also, combined with IBM, it gives more confidence to my customers.

The solution's ecosystem is good but it would be better to create cohesive components in all of the development tools. 

A developers' hub feature would help. 

OpenShift already provides excellent visibility, but bridging the gap with Kubernetes would be key because Red Hat Enterprise Linux drives OpenShift.

I'm a big open-source user. I've been using different forms of Linux for quite some time. For my enterprise purpose, I use the RHEL for other purposes and a few other different Linux operating systems. We have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for more than ten years.

I have experience working with Ubuntu, Fedora, Canonical, etc. From that perspective, the solution's stability is good. The security feature plays a key role in terms of the pace at which it receives updates for operating systems to maintain it.

In terms of the architectural perspective, the nature of the solution is scalable.

The solution's technical support is very good. My clients generally manage it, and I have received positive feedback. They have a responsive support organization to communicate with.

I have used Canonical and Ubuntu. In comparison with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Ubuntu's ecosystem consists of multiple operating systems and container platforms like MicroK8s. The partnership with hyper scalers in terms of deployment is one of its benefits as well. On the flip side, it has some drawbacks regarding licensing and export control, where Red Hat shines well.

The solution's pricing and licensing are good. Although the open-source space is becoming more competitive, Red Hat brings value in terms of support. At the same time, different operators like Canonical Kubernetes are catching up. Thus, the price would become the differentiation factor regarding packages for support, and container ecosystem combined with Ansible. All these key elements would add more value to the pricing.

The solution's key element is its cohesive ecosystem between hybrid and cloud environments. It helps clients such as giant banks create a single space for managing workloads in different hyper scalers. This way, it helps in cost management and visibility. It creates a single platform to manage work. It helps in saving costs, especially with subscription plans. It provides them with a consistent cost structure. Also, being an open-source solution has benefits that fit within the ecosystem.

I rate it an eight out of ten, primarily for the support and licensing terms. It helps some of our enterprise clients navigate open-source licensing and export control complexities.

There are areas of improvement, such as the cycle of updates and the ecosystem as a whole. Also, the elements like Ansible are priced separately. For automation, there is an opportunity to combine everything. Even though they are different products, they shouldn't be charged separately from the ecosystem perspective.

We use the solution majorly for JBoss, Apache, Java workload, and Comcast. We also use it for Apache Sattelite to do all the patching and database management. We use it for almost everything. We were a pure RHEL shop, up until recently. 

The most valuable feature is Satellite. Its consistency in patch upgradation is great. For the ten-year lifecycle, we have been able to rely on it and not worry if the patch will break. We do not need additional patching features since it covers everything.

The Modules feature is awesome but it could be even better.

We have been using the solution for 25 years.

The solution is stable. I have never remotely questioned its stability. The downtime is rare. It is usually a vendor's application issue unrelated to it. 

My company only has one complaint; we have been using it for more than seven years out of its ten-year lifespan and have yet to receive any version update. The drivers have become stale. We are trying to upgrade them manually. It would be nice if they had updated the drivers. If they do not update them, the solution will end soon. They should prevent it from crashing every time we try to update it. We are still rolling Ansible to automate some of the functions but, it is complicated to process with a vast sync of firmware and drivers.

The solution is scalable. I am a Satellite owner and we've had scaling issues with it. Those issues are mostly because my company didn't make it scalable in the right way.

They have their own expectations of how to make something highly available. And Satellite doesn't fit into that. 

I rate the solution's technical support as nine out of ten, as there is always room for improvement. I never had an issue with the support services. It is good and worth the value. 

I don't usually put up a ticket for every minor error. I am an expert and know the technicalities required to resolve the issues. So, whenever I contact them, I expect it to get somewhere. Because most of the time, the executives put more than one problem in the same ticket unrelated to another. It becomes more complex and confusing.

Positive

Red Hat Enterprise Linux generates a return on investment. We have everything on it. We have Windows servers for SharePoint and multiple cloud providers as well. In addition, we have OpenShift and Docker Enterprise, and some other open-source applications.

The solution is a good value for money. They keep adding up essential features to the specific subscription plan. I am also not a big proponent of top-level open-source applications as they do not provide support services. Whereas, with Red Hat, I can call them for queries and get answers immediately. In comparison, open source doesn't have that facility. Even if you hire a support vendor, they just give their opinions and try to help but they don't own the project.

At the end of the day, we have a 999.99% reliability of only 20 minutes a year of downtime with Red Hat. It is impossible to get that with open-source vendors as sometimes the applications might break if it doesn't notify about the changes on time. Conversely, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a ten-year life cycle assurance, so we don't have to worry much. Also, we are in a TAM program. Thus, we can call the support team immediately for any issue.

Our organization constantly evaluates other options, as Red Hat Enterprise Linux's cloud version doesn't offer new features. Other than that, we go back and forth using Centralized and Rocky Linux. We prefer the ones we don't have to pay for the licenses.

It has a strong security posture. I did a SELinux contract for my current company. Compared with open-source alternatives, Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides better support services and reliability. Also, we are rolling out a new Ansible platform for insights. It gathers information about how many jobs we have, how long they take to complete, etc.

We need to manage vulnerabilities for a massive base of clients' systems. We don't use open-source apps for it like Red Hat. We have a third-party tool as we straddle different compliances. However, Red Hat is great about security announcements. I can call them anytime for an update as well. But it is challenging to work with the vendor for scanning machines. It does not know how to work with Red Hat packaging version numbers.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We prefer Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our operating system due to its excellent support. If a business wants something, we deliver it and we prefer a Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based system because of the support. It can be a simple application to a big system. It doesn't have pre-defined roles. It's a go-to operating system. 

Our use cases for it vary from plain operating system management to handling specific tasks such as running Oracle databases or other similar applications. They include quite a broad spectrum of requirements. Also, they are not limited to predefined roles but encompass the entire operating system infrastructure.

The solution's SELinux feature is a gold standard for security. It also has the best ecosystem. 

In addition, its automation platform, ITM, is a good product and works well for us.

Some of the solution's features need to be automated. We encounter the hassle of registering the system and attaching a subscription. Our company has development teams, and we have to develop subscriptions for them. Here, having the solution up and running on the developers' machines is a bit of a hurdle. Although we can run it on platforms like Red Hat Connect but, it needs to be somewhat more accessible so developers can just download it and start with the work.

I have been using the solution for 10-15 years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable when combined with automation features. I rate its scalability a nine.

The solution's customer service is good.

Positive

I have used Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, and macOS. Initially, I worked as a Red Hat Certified Administrator in RHEL 5. Later, I began to work for its partner company. That is how I switched to the solution. It was not a conscious choice. It just evolved that way.

The solution's initial setup process is straightforward. You have to follow the steps, copy the template and multiply it.

The solution's price is reasonable. If you have a license for the support, they provide excellent services. The support team is always available for help in case of errors or system downtime issues.

RHEL’s built-in security features for simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance are good. If you keep SELinux on, it is all good. If you have a system with SELinux off for a long time, it could get you in trouble. The system will make many changes, like restoring files could break your application later. In case you resolve the problems simultaneously, it is fine. 

The troubleshooting feature of Red Hat is excellent. It can solve many issues on the machine right away. In addition, if you have an external scene, then Red Hat Insights is on. I sometimes go to this feature to see its status and what is happening. 

I don't do this on a daily basis and only check it every two weeks, but it's nice to have. I mainly oversee the high-level view of all the systems. This way, I know if the clients' machines need a patch system. 

There are some missing modules for SELinux in Ansible, like the playbook. It becomes a genuine hurdle to manipulate SELinux at the moment. I have to go to the machine, take a file to the repository, and deploy it.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We're using the product to test operating system stability and verify that it runs on the hardware that Trenton Systems produces. If it passes testing, it becomes a validated operating system that we can sell for the server. We plan to offer Red Hat in the coming months to anyone purchasing systems from our company.

The solution’s security feature is the most valuable feature for my company. We offer OS to military or government agencies. For these sectors, security becomes one of the highest priorities, especially the ability to wipe everything out if anything becomes compromised. Red Hat does a great job at that.

The product should be made more accessible to someone who isn't experienced with Linux.

I have been using the solution for four to five months.

The solution is very stable. Compared to many other OSs we test for our company, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has not crashed out on me or given me any problems. Anytime something goes wrong, after some research, I find that it's going wrong because I'm doing it wrong, not because the OS is fighting me in any way.

I haven't used support where I'm emailing or speaking to someone directly, but I've used a lot of the online support just by looking at different user guides, health guides, and things like that. Everything is really well documented. 

Sometimes there are posts about similar issues but with different remediation based on different circumstances. You might have the answer open in a tab, but you've got nine tabs open to find the right answer.

Positive

I have used Ubuntu, CentOS, openSUSE, and Mint. Red Hat Enterprise Linux definitely has an edge in security and the ability to control what the user at the end stage is doing. However, it is difficult to learn.

The licensing makes perfect sense for the number of features you get with the operating system.

We test Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9, the latest version. We do backtesting for versions 7 and 8 as well. The product is very secure. It took me a while to wrap my head around the whole Subscription Manager system and understand how that worked. Even at a base level, it provides a much higher level of security and the ability to take remediation steps if things go wrong. You can shut the whole system down and bring it back from the ground up.

From the keynote, it looks like steps are already being taken to make the solution more accessible to any regular user. 

The product does a really fantastic job of reducing the overall risk to the user. If a user is doing something they’re not supposed to be doing, it's very easy for the system administrator to walk them out of doing it. As for maintaining compliance, if a user is only meant to have specific packs and is only meant to perform specific tasks, it's very, very easy to lock it into only being able to do that one specific thing.

Most people in IT enjoy a little learning. Everything I've done so far with Red Hat has been installing, setting up the account, getting everything registered, and then worrying about testing to validate. It is difficult to start with, but the more you learn about it, the easier it gets. The more I use it, the more capabilities I find within the system.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

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

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

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

I have been using the solution for 20 years.

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

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

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

Neutral

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

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

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

The overall costs depend on the project and the company.

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

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

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

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

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

We installed the product at a very large hospital as their underlying operating system for Kubernetes, but it is not OpenShift. We use it for one-off servers and lab machines.

Copious documentation is probably the best feature of the solution. If you have a lot of high-quality documentation in one location, it is easier to search and get exactly what you need. It's more efficient when I get stuck on a problem or need help configuring something. It saves us time searching through Google or looking through GitHub Issues to solve the problems. It is a top-notch solution.

If the solution were easier to use and understand, it would not get disabled as often as it does. The solution should be made more secure. The changes made to CentOS make it hard for somebody to spin up and test it without having a preexisting relationship and license. 

If somebody wants to get something going quickly and is trying to settle on Red Hat, they don't have a free version to go to. Ubuntu and SUSE provide such platforms to the users. It is one Achilles heel in Red Hat at the moment. 

Even if Red Hat would enable a full version trial for people to test it, it would be less than what others are doing. Others are giving it away for free until you actually need support, and then you can choose if you need to buy it. With SUSE you can install it with SUSE Leap. It's pretty much the same thing. When you want support, you must enable support, and it becomes SLES.

There's nothing in Red Hat where I can run along on the free version for as long as I need to, and then when I want support, activate support on the same product. I have to reinstall it if I want Red Hat. Even with CentOS, it still wasn't possible to just activate it for Red Hat and make it become Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That's been something that's long been lacking in the product.

I have been using the solution since 1996 or 1997.

I have no complaints at all about the stability of the product.

As time goes on, the solution gets better. It adopts new features. I would say that it does a pretty good job.

The few times that I've encountered support, it was great. I don't really go through support channels. However, when I reach out and ask a question to the people I know in support, I get answers pretty quickly. I find that they have a good deal of product knowledge.

Positive

When I first started using the product in the 90s, it was just Red Hat. So I used Red Hat, and I used IBM Slack. I've used quite a number of different Linux distributions. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been around longer than Ubuntu. I still use other solutions along with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Typically, the initial setup is pretty straightforward. If it's virtualization, it is really easy because we have an image already, or we can create one. We can use Kickstart. I used to run a 5000-node HPC cluster in the early 2000s based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We used a combination of SystemImager and Kickstart for it.

It's the default posture of a lot of the third-party vendors that you should just disable and leave them off. With containerization being prevalent everywhere, portability is across the board. Red Hat Enterprise Linux adopted Podman as opposed to Docker. Podman is a good tool, and I like it. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the standard on which many others have based their platforms.

Using SELinux is largely misunderstood. If used properly, it provides a great platform for us. Red Hat is a big corporation, and we have people we can reach out and talk to. The same goes for SUSE. For Ubuntu, I have always gone straight to NVIDIA for support. I personally don't know of any great differentiators between all the products. I know Red Hat. It's been around longer, and I've had a long history that makes me comfortable. 

I wouldn’t recommend one over the other. It would come down to the use case. If someone wants Kubernetes on-prem, I would probably guide them toward OpenShift. I do have customers that don't run OpenShift on-prem. I often find that the customers already have a preference because they already have a license. So it's never really a decision that falls on me.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux uses firewalls, so configuring a firewall is easy. I have deployed the solution in multiple places. Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten.

There are multiple use cases, and I am mostly focused on information security. Before we promote an ACS policy to production, we should be able to test that build and see how that policy behaves for that build. We use Podman to build some test images and get them to our development box. Then we use commands that we scan against those images. That has been one of the major use cases. 

In the future, we'll move our automation program from an on-premises Windows server to a Linux server. Over a period of time, we want to move those applications to the cloud and OpenShift. Currently, we have many legacy applications that are still being run on Windows Server, and we use the title job scheduler for that. Once we mature and gain more confidence, we want to containerize those applications and move them to OpenShift and Linux.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's most valuable features are the Podman and a lot of packages that come inbuilt as part of the regular package. Podman gives you the opportunity to build those images. Since it's a public registry, you cannot pull those images from a docker, and proxy blocks that. If we know how to recreate that scenario, we use Podman to recreate that image.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux should provide more training because many people are not very familiar with Linux's user interface. If it is made very similar to Windows and people can relate to it, they would be more comfortable.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for seven to eight years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a stable solution.

I have experience interacting with Red Hat support for ACS. The initial level of support is very minimal. They try to collect all the data, then go to developers or technical people, which usually takes time. So we don't get an immediate response. Hence, there is scope for improvement in Red Hat Enterprise Linux's customer support.

Raising a ticket and having somebody look into it takes time. I rate raising a ticket and addressing it a six to seven out of ten. However, we interact with a responsive relationship manager, who escalates and gets issues fixed. I rate this relationship manager an eight out of ten.

Neutral

Since we have the capability to test vulnerable images, we know much in advance what their impact will be. We can test ACS policies against those vulnerable images. That gives us early visibility instead of deploying that application and finding what is happening there. Using Red Hat Enterprise Linux and all associated components gives us that visibility into vulnerable images, and we can set policies based on whatever we see. So in terms of business impact, we avoid many vulnerabilities that get into the production.

We run some applications on the cloud, but they are not business-critical applications. We run all business-critical applications on-premises. We are not dependent on the cloud for business-critical applications. We are not locked with the vendor.

We use Qualys to scan the underlying node. We expect any critical vulnerabilities to be patched as early as possible. We have an enterprise policy wherein any business-critical vulnerabilities seen on business-critical applications or nodes need to be fixed within 30 days. If some running application is exposed to the internet, we want that to be prioritized. If vendors can prioritize a 30-day life cycle for critical vulnerabilities, that would really help many other organizations.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the only option we are currently looking at. We don't want to go with Windows. We already have this ecosystem where we use OpenShift, and it's already integrated with ACS. So we would not like to go with any other different OS. Red Hat Enterprise Linux will integrate easily with the entire ecosystem.

Overall, I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux an eight out of ten.

We are currently using Red Hat Enterprise Linux's versions 6, 7, and 8. We run the OS both on-prem and in the cloud.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for web applications, containers, Kubernetes, and simple scripting servers. The scripting servers are used to run scripts on run drops and so on. However, the biggest use cases are containers and web app workloads.

The cloud providers are AWS and Alibaba.

Red Hat helps our organization avoid cloud vendor lock-in because we can run Kubernetes and a few different workloads directly on Red Hat across different cloud providers. Since Red Hat is an operating system, we can migrate our workloads to any cloud provider that supports Red Hat.

Avoiding vendor lock-in and being able to move workflows between cloud providers has saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easy to recover, especially from a backup. I believe this is because of its resilience. If I use an instance, I can go to my backups and restore it without much trouble. I was going to compare it to Windows for a moment, where there might be some additional steps required to clean things up after recovery. However, I haven't had many issues where I needed to do any cleanup afterward.

It is easy to move workloads between the cloud and our data center using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The ease of migration depends on the cloud provider and what they allow us to do. However, for the most part, replication-based migration between cloud providers or on-premises works well. 

Linux is good for hardening the operating system. Logical volumes allow us to dynamically expand volumes, which is valuable from an operational perspective. This is especially true in cloud environments, where we pay for every kilobyte of storage. By using logical volumes, we can expand the disk on demand without downtime, which can help us keep costs down.

The price has room for improvement.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for three years, but I have known about the OS since version four.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is definitely resilient and easy to recover, especially when compared to Windows. I enjoyed working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux more than Microsoft Windows, especially because of its resilience.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's scalability is easy to manage. We can simply spin up more instances as needed, and then turn them off when we no longer need them. This means that Red Hat Enterprise Linux's scalability is not as much of an issue with the cloud provider.

We have around 2,500 instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in our environment.

Red Hat support is generally good, but it can sometimes take a little longer than we would like to get a response, especially when the issue is through a web-based chat.

Positive

The on-premises deployments are subscription based, and the cloud instances are from the providers which are AWS and Alibaba.

We can always ask for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be less expensive but when we compare it to other options, there are savings in the long run.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux was our first choice because of its enterprise support. That was the key factor. We do also run other Linux distributions, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is our primary choice because of the enterprise support. 

The big difference between Red Hat Enterprise Linux and other Linux-based operating systems is the support. There isn't much difference other than the syntax, where the command is "at, get" versus Red Hat using YUM or DNF for installation. So outside of that, the support is the main difference.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten. No solution is perfect, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very close.

Our engineering team probably used the image-building tool. I am on the operations side, so I do not see that part of the process. I take the images that are already built and deploy them.

I think it's just a workflow issue. We need to improve our own workflows to be able to manage them better. Red Hat support is already good when we encounter something we're unfamiliar with. So, we need to get Enterprise CoreOS from Red Hat for those cases. I think as we encounter more of our own workloads, we'll need to improve our workflows even further.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're the integrators or implementors of the solution.

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

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

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

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

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

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