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My number one request for improvement would be better Kickstart functionality, as I feel the Kickstart notation is outdated and it's not programmatic, so that would be my focus point, based on what I do.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

My main use case for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is application hosting.

The feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I appreciate the most is the stability. 

I used to use Ubuntu quite a bit, however, the stability of RHEL is the main thing that I enjoy about it. 

RHEL benefits my company by providing a stable platform and strong support behind it, which are the motivating factors of using it in general.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps me solve pain points such as support stability, so maintenance and operations are much easier. I manage my Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems for provisioning and patching using Ansible, Satellite, and Puppet, and I am satisfied with that management experience.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) supports my hybrid cloud strategy by looking into Openshift. Currently, we are independently deploying between the two environments because we do not yet have a platform to bridge those into a true hybrid.

Security requirements were not necessarily a consideration in choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) in the cloud since we have our security team for all of our security compliance, so it is just our standard that we use.

The solution can be improved, especially for user-provided solutions; they could be vetted more thoroughly by Red Hat. I cannot think of anything specific that could improve Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), aside from my thoughts on support, particularly since I have not yet tried version nine. Better support would make it a ten.

At this company, I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for two and a half years.

The stability and reliability of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) platform are great.

I do not know if we have run into scaling problems with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Typically, our app people work directly with the vendor and request a few VMs, so we do not really have issues with running out of compute resources.

The customer service and technical support I receive are mostly good; sometimes it is hit or miss, but mostly good. If I had to rate them from one to ten, I would give them a nine.

Positive

Before I came to the company, they were using Ubuntu, and I tried to convince them to switch over to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). While I am using it today, we still support Ubuntu because there are certain researchers that prefer it, but for the operations of the hospital, it is all Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

I have been involved in updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), going from version eight to nine. I typically just deploy the next version and migrate whatever application or system may be to that instead of jumping to another version. It is more about deploying a new system and migrating the old system over, to avoid any dependency issues.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) from my perspective is probably security and performance. We run a lot of Windows, which comes with costs to keep it constantly updated, while RHEL seems to have fewer vulnerabilities and is one of the more performant platforms among Linux distributions.

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing has been fair. I have looked for virtual data center licenses and it seems fairly priced compared to alternatives such as Windows.

The knowledge base offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is hit or miss. Sometimes people provide answers that exactly solve the problem, and sometimes it is for older versions that are not applicable.

I have not purchased Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) through AWS Marketplace. We are looking into that option.

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

My main use cases involve using it to run our Ansible automation platform and various workloads, depending on what Development decides based on the project. We also use it for our Kubernetes clusters.

The features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I appreciate the most are focused on stability. It is a reliable system that I can depend on more than anything else. That stability benefits my company by providing more uptime and more satisfied gamers.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) helps us solve pain points related to stability and documentation. It is very easy to find solutions to problems or access official documentation, whereas with other Debian-based distributions, one often finds themselves searching through random forums.

Regarding built-in security features for risk reduction and compliance maintenance, some features are straightforward when following standards and installation profiles. However, the development side frequently mentions challenges with SELinux, as it is more difficult to understand and somewhat esoteric. Some features are very well-developed and easily understood, while others are more complex to implement.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risks. While there is not much technical difference between RHEL and Oracle Linux, compared to other alternatives, it provides benefits.

We manage our systems for provisioning and patching using Ansible automation controller for patches and mirror repositories as needed.

What is lacking is better FS support natively in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). It has many nice features, however, XFS is becoming outdated. That is the major improvement that would be relatively easy to implement, perhaps around version 11. Fedora has already introduced it, so it is in the pipeline.

When it comes to its stability and reliability, it is great.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales fine with the growing needs of my company. I do not see much difference between RHEL and any other real distribution in those terms. 

As far as scalability, it is all Linux at the end of the day and will scale equally. The management tools and features on top of it provide the value-add, but regarding the base operating system, I do not see much difference.

We do not use customer service and technical support frequently. It is more about getting that checkbox for insurance, compliance, or whatever regulation we need to follow. 

If I had to rate the customer support, I would give it an eight as it is quite good. 

Positive

My experience deploying Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has evolved. In the past, it used to be more complicated, however, with current development tools and methodologies, it is far easier. Using Packer and initialization files that build every time, it functions smoothly.

My team deploys the solution on-premise, and we have varying departments and organizations for on-prem.

From my perspective, I have seen a return on investment while using this platform. It is beneficial to have that stability and reliable package repositories that we depend on, rather than using something more open-source and community-driven. There is definitely a good return.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing has been satisfactory. It aligns with business expectations.

I consider all distributions before or while using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), however, the application team ultimately decides what fits their development cycle and needs best. For our on-premise workloads that need to be stable and operate over years, it is our default choice.

For upgrades or migrations, I recommend building new and migrating. My team operates both on-premise and in the cloud, and we have purchased Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) through AWS Marketplace. 

Overall rating: nine out of ten. To make it a ten, I would want to see more features. As someone who considers themselves an open-source zealot, the locking down of package repositories behind subscription paywalls was upsetting. It used to be a ten out of ten before that change.

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) include application support.

Features benefit my company by allowing for cross-site administration, creating a solid baseline across our different environments and using Satellite for cross-site management.

One of the features I appreciate the most about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is the usability and satellite integration across multiple sites, which helps us significantly. 

Many of my current pain points are related to the automation portion with having Ansible building. I have been involved in upgrades or migrations for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), specifically for RHEL 7.

We manage our Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) systems using Satellite and Ansible combined, which automates all of our patches, meaning the server administrator doesn't necessarily have to do anything beyond checking online to ensure that automation is performing as expected.

For the compliance part in government environments, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is compliant with their cyber policies, and it has extensive integration for that. There are also Ansible templates being built up.

My upgrade or migration plans to stay current involve moving from RHEL 8 to RHEL 9, if not RHEL 10, as I know that RHEL 8 reached its end of support life a few years ago, so we do have some work to do while trying to stay on top of releases and upgrades.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risk in our environment; I've only been integrated with it for the last two years and we haven't seen any specific issues caused by Red Hat or Linux itself relating to downtime.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) could be improved by incorporating some of the third-party repositories, as different repos might show more options than one would get with a base builder for Red Hat, so having the choice to include those during install would be beneficial.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for the last six to seven years for the company, and personally, even longer.

I haven't seen any issues with the stability and reliability of the platform; we've been building up and tearing down our OpenShift environment frequently, and it consistently comes up and down and repairs itself.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales effectively with the growing needs of my company, as we're now utilizing OpenShift to deploy applications, databases, and other resources in a containerized environment, which reflects the direction the world is heading towards in terms of containerization.

I am not involved in pricing, setup costs, or licensing, but I can say the contract deal we have with Red Hat seems pretty fair, along with the support they provide.

Positive

We did consider other solutions in our journey, particularly looking into OpenShift, however, Red Hat is probably our number one choice.

The initial setup has been straightforward. We didn't have challenges. On top of that, you have the automation. It's getting easier. They continuously build in more tools and more automated processes so we can spin up the VMs easily.

We have been involved in migrations - specifically, RHEL 7 and Linux. The lead process is relatively straightforward.

For me, the biggest return on investment when using this product is automation.

While I am not involved in pricing or licensing, my understanding is that it's a pretty fair contract deal that we have with Red Hat and the support that they provide.

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

My main use cases for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are that I work at a university, and the infrastructure of the university is all based on open source, with the main operating system being Linux.

The feature of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) that I appreciate the most is the scalability. Scalability has helped my company grow in general by allowing us to handle the inscriptions of students simultaneously. We have to subscribe to tens of thousands of students at the same time, and only with an operating system that has scalability can we accomplish this.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has helped to mitigate downtime and lower risk, though I don't have specific numbers about this.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) can be improved in terms of applications to interact better with the operating system for monitoring, control, and a better administration interface, though I don't work in the technical department.

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

The stability of the platform is very good.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) scales with the growing needs of my organization very effectively. During the time of company growth, we needed to scale the services and equipment that use the operating system, and it performed very effectively.

The customer service and technical support with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are very good. We have technical support in Brazil that's very good, and I don't have any complaints about this.

A long time ago, I considered other solutions before choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). I don't consider any other options anymore.

The deployment was very good. I liked hte process very much. 

I have only used one version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and have upgraded the operating system during its lifecycle. My experience upgrading it was very easy.

The biggest return on investment when using Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for me is the security, the scalability, and the integration with other platforms and tools.

While there is always room for improvement as there's no perfection, I would rate this solution nine out of ten.