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.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for engineering simulation activities.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) benefit our company as we're able to run the simulation software without question.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps us solve pain points. We design our engineering products and need Linux systems to design the products. 

The feature I appreciate the most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is that it's supported by our vendors that support the applications we run. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is fine; I don't know how it can be improved. I don't think they could enhance one of their features. 

When we go from version seven to eight, and eight's a little slower, or certain things don't work, they should ensure there's 100% improvement or stability; I don't want anything broken.

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

The stability and reliability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are fine; I'd be surprised if it wasn't stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales to my needs just fine.

The customer service and technical support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are okay; I would rate it a five out of ten. What could make it a ten are improvements in customer service to reach Dell quality. It might be an unfair advantage since Dell is all hardware, and the quality of their support is top-notch for hardware, while Red Hat's all software. It's a whole different situation; support is easier with hardware than it is with software. My only suggestion would be to get support to the right people. 

I don't want to go through two levels of support to get somebody who can solve my problem; I want to talk to somebody who can work with me around the globe. If I call and get someone who's in the UK on his shift when it's ending, give me someone in San Jose to pick up where he left off.

Neutral

I considered other solutions before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). We were all open to CentOS, AlmaLinux, and similar options, which is why I've been using the open-source software for 15-20 years.

The deployment process of Red Hat is good. There were no problems.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for me is just its compatibility. We have one source of truth that's generally accepted in the industry for application software.

I don't handle the pricing or setup costs for my company as we've got a big contract.

I chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) due to the fact that when Red Hat bought CentOS, they eliminated the model; otherwise, we would probably still be using CentOS.

Our upgrade or migration plans to stay current with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are limited by the applications we run, so I won't upgrade to version ten until the applications say they can run it; that's the number one thing. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped us mitigate downtime and lower risk as we have plenty of extra systems. I don't have an application that's a 24/7 application that I can't shut down. 

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in general 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.