We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run Oracle Databases for CC&B and JDM. All the RHEL stuff is on-prem. The CC&B team manages the customer care and billing stuff, but we take care of the operating systems, and the application users manage the applications. We have 200 to 300 users on RHEL. 

We are missing random devices for patching and everything, and we don't have the Linux data license for that. If we had that, life would be much easier. Right now, we patch using Yum updates and we manually do configuration changes from our end.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux improves our security. On our end, we only use the console to reboot the server and apply security. We patch it completely if we have any security updates. Every quarter, we run a report using quality and whatever it was pulling. That's what we are patching. 

Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes patching and scripting much easier, and it provides all the features I need for patching and VM updates. It's easy to apply Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features when it comes to simplifying risk reduction or maintaining compliance.

For phone support, we had to buy a license for all our servers, and it was a bit pricey for us. 

I have used RHEL for 21 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is highly stable. We've never had any problems or crashes. It's very smooth from our end.

It's easy to scale Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Right now, we're discussing what will happen a year from now, when we plan to increase our usage. 

I rate Red Hat customer service eight out of 10. Their knowledge base is fantastic. You can easily find whatever you need. Their support responds immediately, whereas we struggled with support from Oracle. 

We were using Oracle Linux, and I don't see much difference except the support. We were not getting good support from Oracle because it took too long whenever we opened a ticket. Oracle was also too expensive, and patching is much easier with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We were not looking for more features. Oracle Linux has a lot more packages than we need.

Setting up Red Hat Enterprise Linux was straightforward. You need at least two system admins to do so. Migrations and upgrades are also easy. Our main products are CC&B and JDM, with an Oracle database on the back end. We were highly satisfied with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for migrating all of those. We also have other solutions like SQL Server, which is on the Windows operating system.

Performance-wise, this Linux is better because you can ignore some packages if you don't need them. 

Oracle Linux is free, but we were having many other issues with it.

I rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux nine out of 10. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very easy to install and manage. 

We run web apps. We run databases. We run a high-compute platform on Red Hat Enterprise Linux variants.

All of our customers run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We run Red Hat Enterprise Linux for mesh nodes. For anything Linux, if we can use Red Hat Enterprise Linux because it is supported, we put it on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Probably 60% to 80% of our infrastructure is Red Hat.

Having a stable Linux platform means I am not spending my time rebuilding Linux systems, constantly patching, and doing things like that. It helps to have an approved and supported platform. I know they have tested everything and when I patch my system, it is not going to blow up. It just does not happen. The other thing is that we have had catastrophic failures, and they have helped us out of these catastrophic failures. The support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux has always been good, and the community around Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been fantastic.

We were also CentOS users, so we have committed to AppStream as well. Being a part of the community has been a huge benefit for us. Community adoption means it is easy for people to find information. It helps new people get on boarded into Linux.

We mostly have an on-prem environment. VMware is a significant chunk. We do have some Red Hat clusters. We do have clustered applications, both physical and virtual, running on the cluster. We do have some cloud. We have our own internal cloud with VMware running behind the scenes. Having a consistent image means things always look the same. It is boring, but it is cookie-cutter. That is what we like. We like everything to come out the same. We have consistency and the ability to patch across our entire environment. We are also a Satellite user, so we are able to patch everything and maintain everything in a single pane of glass. It means I can have fewer admins administering many more machines. If you have a reduction in failure and an improvement in automation, things just work.

We have created what we call creator nodes. We have built a platform on Red Hat with Podman so that they can connect with Visual Studio code and do development or Ansible development. We now have our mainframe people developing automation with Linux with all of the plugins right there. It is a consistent environment for them, and that has been awesome. That has been fantastic. We have a few hiccups with Podman. They are working on the permissions to be able to have multiple people run Podman. They are working on the UID and GID problem that we had earlier. Right now, we are running Docker, but I am planning on moving to Podman once they fix that. We have also automated the build process for those nodes. If we need to scale up, we build a couple more VMs, and we are done.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. We are containerizing applications. We are pulling the Windows container that we have and converting it to the Red Hat Enterprise Linux container. At the Red Hat Summit, the keynote about image RHEL with systemd blew my mind. It is a change from what we have been doing, but it should make a lot of things more reachable for us. It is cool because now my container image looks like my VM image. You cannot make it simpler for people to develop in a container. It looks the same. There is no difference. That is going to drive heavy adoption with us because if there is no difference, people are not going to have that fear of something new. It has 100% impacted our projects in a positive way. We have started to migrate all of our workloads to OpenShift now that we have got it in the door. It makes a lot of sense. I can redeploy. I can patch. I can do all this with code. I do not have to maintain a VM and a container. It makes life simple.

We have seen a drop in TCO because we ended up buying more than building. When you build something, there is the hidden cost of support, training, and the precarious position you get in if you deploy something you do not fully understand. We were there. We had five instances and a bunch of complexity. We reduced that down to one. We were able to simplify our complex nature. That is what Red Hat has allowed us to do. We have been able to roll out and we have been consistent. I have got machines out there that have been running for two or three years with no problems. They just patch them in the background. It just works.

I love systemd. They have made some significant improvements with the firewalld console. I do not use it that much, but I know it makes Linux reachable for people who are not normally Linux admins.

I just love the command line configuration. It makes that easy for me. Another thing is that when you combine that with Ansible, your life is simple. You can do a lot of your jobs without having to touch the system. That is my ideal.

I appreciate everything they have done. The systems are just bulletproof. We do not have problems with it. Support for file system differences and migrations has been solid.

There have been a few things that I have run into. They have significantly improved DNF and YUM, but there can be better communication around what is going on. A lot of it is related to communication. They are building solid products, and quite often, people do not find out about them until two or three years have passed. We still have not discovered everything in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. A lot of it is because we have not had the time, but it would be helpful to have a little bit more communication around it. Maybe that is on us to make sure that we stay updated with the community.

I have been using it since Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.5. It has been around 20 years. I love Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

I would rate it a nine out of ten for stability. It is stable. It is fairly bulletproof. There are a lot more things that they are adding to make it better.

I have had no problems scaling up or scaling horizontally. I have had some very large Red Hat Enterprise Linux nodes with 254 gigs of memory and a big chunky Oracle database system. We have had no problems with them. We have not had any problems with running with multiple memory cluster nodes. We have had 100 gigs network, and we had no problems. We had a high-end SAN and a high-end network, and we had no issues.

They have good integrations, and they have not had too many problems with external SAN providers. They have been fairly consistent with keeping up with everybody else and keeping their drivers good.

They are probably one of the better ones in the industry. I can get a real answer, and I do not feel like people are breathing down my neck and saying, "I am going to close your ticket. I have not heard from you in 15 minutes." It has been a very positive experience. They have always helped us out when we have completely gone sideways.

They are very patient with the level of experience that a lot of people have. We have a significant number of junior admins who put in tickets that probably should not have been put in. They have been very patient. Overall, it has been a good and positive experience.

Positive

Before Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I was strictly using Solaris and AIX. I never used Ubuntu. It was just straight, big-frame Unix before I went to Linux. I did not change too many platforms.

We use Ansible to deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux machines on VMware. That is 80% to 90% of our workload. For everything else, I have done PXE boot and kickstarts.

We are using a hybrid cloud. Our cloud providers are Azure and AWS. We work with both. The deployment on Azure and AWS was simple. We built Elasticsearch inside of Azure. It was a click-button deployment. We use TerraForm to deploy most of it, and then we have Ansible to do the rest.

I wanted to try to do more infrastructure as code, but it is hard to get traditional admins into that mindset, so it is always a mix. I deploy these servers for them with TerraForm, and then I pretend I never did, and they can do whatever with them. It then goes back into traditional life cycle management. Sometimes they delete them, and sometimes they forget about them. Satellite has helped us keep track of where everything is. It has helped us track our life cycles. It has been helpful for us.

We have used Red Hat consultants multiple times. They helped us set a few things up and clean up our pipelines. We have been very happy with our Red Hat consultants and our last deployment of OpenShift AAP. We loved their consultants. They were fantastic.

The biggest ROI that we have seen by using Red Hat Enterprise Linux is accessibility to information for frontline support people, midline support people, and developers. There is a ton of information, and there is a ton of community support.

For us, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a consistent platform because if we are on a customer's Rocky machine, we already know Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We can deal with that. It is a skill set that is very broad across multiple platforms. That means we can apply what we have learned and what we have been trained in. While working with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux team, we have learned best practices, and we can apply those across the board. That partnership has helped us better our internal practices whether it is Red Hat Enterprise Linux or not. That is a positive. Satellite has also been a real positive for us because we can now manage all of our systems from a single pane of glass. That is what my frontline people have been asking for. They wanted one place to patch the systems, and now they can.

Our experience was incredibly positive because we started working with OpenShift before we were fully licensed. They knew we were going in that direction. The same thing happened with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They knew we would buy tons of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, so they were a little bit more relaxed. We wanted a thousand licenses, and we could pick those up. We true up. Our license experience has been positive with the exception of having to deal with all of the broken-up accounts, which is as much our fault as anybody's.

My biggest complaint is that we have eight or ten different contracts. It is hard to keep track of what is on what and where we are getting the most value-add out of our benefits.

They are helping us solve that problem. We have reached out to our account executives. They will help us solve that problem. That is a huge step because that has been a problem for 15 years. It will help us consolidate and understand what we are spending across the board instead of seeing what we are spending in chunks.

OpenShift has come close to paying for itself in the first year and a half. That is an easy business case to make if you have the direct ability to show cost savings. We are getting cost savings, and we have the ability to show those cost savings. These are the two major benefits we have seen with AAP and Red Hat Enterprise Linux bits. That has been a positive for us. Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI and some of the other things they are starting to do are probably going to enable a lot of our developers to start taking advantage of them. Red Hat Enterprise Linux AI changes the belief that AI is out of reach for a normal developer.

We considered the idea of building this entire platform on Rocky as a free solution. It just was not cost-effective. There are hidden costs of patching and maintaining. They require care and feeding. We wanted cattle, not pets. We had a bunch of pets. Red Hat Enterprise Linux enabled us to get into that cattle methodology and mindset. Our mesh nodes are built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. If my mesh node goes sideways, I do not care. I just delete the VM, redeploy it, and run my playbook. In 15 minutes, I am back up and running again. Why would I troubleshoot it? It takes time. I do not care about troubleshooting. It enables us to rinse and repeat a lot of our processes.

People turn off too many of the tools way too often. We have a lot of room for improvement as an organization to embrace SELinux. We are still working on that. That has a significant amount of value. We want to embrace the GPG sign code in AAP. I do not want anything but approved containers and code running on our platform and our customer's platform. They have enabled us to be incredibly secure, and we are yet to fully take advantage of those offerings. It is a goal, and we are going to get there.

To a colleague who is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, I would say that Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based variants are the best in my opinion. If I have a choice, I will always go for CentOS, Fedora, Rocky, or something else that is Red Hat Enterprise Linux-based. If they were not going to go with Red Hat, I would probably tell them to go with CentOS but stay behind a little bit because they do not want to be at the bleeding edge of CentOS. That relationship kind of changed when they took it to AppStream instead of a more supportive platform.

I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten. They keep doing well, and they keep getting better. As long as they stay on the same path, I do not see us not using Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the future. It has been consistent. Why would we change?

We are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for running various things. We have a lot of virtual machines. The applications that are running on it are a bunch of shell scripts for processing orders, marketing campaigns, generating reports, or running some Java applications.

We have the customization capability. We can easily customize it, and we can also automate and deploy it. I have a command line interface. I am a command line junkie, and I am able to use that, config files, and Ansible to be able to easily figure out what I need to do to automate things. It feels like I know what it is doing and how to make it do what I want. I do not have to weave some magical arcane hack the way I have to do in Windows.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has enabled us to centralize development in a lot of ways. We have it hooked in through our GitHub. We are trying to combine where we are storing things and then have a standard way of how we are deploying things and have some standard configurations. With every single server, we do not have to worry about how to set this up because we are doing the same thing the same way. We can just do it across the board, and then we only have to worry about the interesting parts.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features are great for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance. There are published CVEs, and there is SELinux, which I do not use and I always turn it off. Firewalls and tooling around that make it easy to use. The automation on top of that makes it easy to configure. With a push of a button, it is done.

We do not have to worry too much about portability. We are coming from Oracle Linux. We were primarily an Oracle Linux shop, and because that is based on it, it just works. We have not had any issues.

The fact that it is Linux is valuable. Why I like it in general is that I know what it is doing. I can figure out what it is doing, and I can make it do what I want. I am not delving into arcane registry things.

I am still trying to figure out the features it has. There is so much that it can do. What it does really well is that it allows you to do things.

It was probably 2008 when I first started using it. The company was using Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and I was with the internal help desk supporting the Linux side.

Its stability is great. It is stable and rock-solid.

Its scalability is also great. It does not matter if the host is beefy or not. It is just going to run on it, and it is going to handle the work. Whether you have a couple of cores or 64 cores, it is just going to do it.

Their support is good. There is good responsiveness. They quickly get me to the person who knows the answer, but I have not used them much.

Positive

We were using Oracle Linux. We are switching because of some of the things. Oracle licensing has been a point of frustration. Their support is comparably difficult to work with, and the support documentation is a mess.

Red Hat is so much easier to navigate. It has been overall a much more pleasant experience to work with Red Hat.

We are using it on-prem, and then our cloud is a Kubernetes cluster on AWS, so it is basically on-prem.

Our deployment model is a manual kickstart with Ansible for configuration. My experience with deployment is good. I kickstart it and then hit it with Ansible, and it is done. It is very easy.

I did the deployment on my own.

We have not yet seen an ROI. It has not been in for long enough. There are no savings in terms of manhours because the actual day-to-day usage remains the same with Oracle Linux or Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, getting some of the metrics with Red Hat Insights is going to be helpful as we get into a better patching cycle. I am anticipating an easier life.

We are expecting an overall decline in the costs because of the differences between the Red Hat licensing and Oracle licensing. We are expecting a net decrease in overall cost. For using it, other than the license, there is no cost.

The setup cost is non-existent. With licensing, there was a little snafu because I misread something. There was a slight learning curve because we use virtual data center licensing. We had to understand how it all maps. We had to understand how that mapping works when the hypervisors are Red Hat or VMware. There is a slight learning curve, but it worked out. It ends up being easy.

I did not evaluate other options mainly because I have had experience with it before. From my prior experience, I already knew what I wanted.

We are trying to use Red Hat Insights. I need to finish updating the playbooks to hook our host. We are in the midst of transitioning from Oracle Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I have not fully hooked everything in, but we will be using Red Hat Insights.

We just started using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for containerization projects. We have not yet seen any impact of Red Hat Enterprise Linux on containerization projects.

If a colleague is looking at open-source, cloud-based operating systems for Linux instead of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a lot of it would depend on their use case, what they are going to need for it, and whether they have an enterprise environment. There is a cost associated with it which can be a downside. I am an open-source lover. I do not like paying for stuff, but I get it. They need to look at the cost, and if the cost is prohibitive, they need to look at something that is compatible and as similar as possible.

Overall, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a nine out of ten. I generally do not give out a ten. There needs to be something spectacular for a ten, so that is my personal bias against the top of the scale.

We mainly use RPM-based systems to give our developers virtual machines.

The most valuable features of using RHEL for us are the standard way to run Linux and tools like NetworkManager. They make things easier for us.

I prefer a product that offers everything in a yearly subscription, like VMware, and I think RHEL should consider offering it as well.

I have been using RHEL for 15 years.

The scalability of the solution is good.

We use RHEL deployed in different zones, only on-premise, not in the cloud. Deploying RHEL depends on the end user, but migrations aren't usually a problem due to site forwards. The hardest part is dealing with end-user applications on the machines. We use Ansible for scripting, especially with Oracle. Sometimes, meeting the end of life for RHEL versions is tough, and we have had to buy extended support for RHE because some applications reached the end of life within a year. I appreciate the extended support option, though I prefer not to use it.

RHEL's pricing and licensing are quite expensive. For a big company, paying these fees might be manageable, but as a government organization, spending tax money on such expensive solutions is challenging, even though we do have the funds.

I see benefits in using RHEL because it offers stability and long-term support. Although we use both RHEL and Ubuntu, I have noticed that updates in Ubuntu can change things unexpectedly within a main release, which I don't like. That is why I focus on RHEL for its consistent and reliable updates.

RHEL's built-in security features are very good for risk reduction, business continuity, and maintaining compliance. We apply security guidelines in Linux using RHEL, which provides all the necessary baselines. We can choose and apply what we need directly to our RHEL systems.

I would say that open-source cloud-based operating systems like Debian are stable and have been around for a long time. There is a whole community supporting it, making it a strong alternative to RHEL with fewer licensing costs.

Overall, I would rate RHEL as a nine out of ten.