My experience is primarily on-premises. I work in the financial and banking area, which has about 2,000 VMs.
The benefits are reliability, stability, and good support.
I find Red Hat Enterprise Linux stable.
The knowledge base offered by Red Hat is good. They also have good support for the business. The web console has been acceptable, but we don't really use those tools.
I don't find Red Hat Enterprise Linux's security features to be good. They have many vulnerabilities that haven't been fixed for many years. They have numerous vulnerabilities that remain unresolved. Just some security details could be fixed. They have many vulnerabilities left over from previous years, with not enough being fixed, and their commitment is only to fix the critical and important ones. For moderate and low severity issues, they don't have the commitment. The security part is weak. Based on all scan reports, they have many vulnerabilities that can't be fixed adequately.
We will be involved with some Red Hat Enterprise Linux upgrades or migrations to other cloud platforms. It's not straightforward in my opinion; we have to create an image from Red Hat Virtualization Manager and convert the image to a format that can be recognized by other platforms, such as Microsoft Azure. We have to convert the image and then import it to the Azure cloud. It's not easy, as it requires manual work. There's no tool available for this process.
I have three years of experience with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The uptime is excellent as it's automated and stable. I would say the uptime is very good.
Overall, their support is good. I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten.
We didn't use any other Linux systems before. Initially, we used other operating systems such as AIX and Solaris, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux was the first Linux we introduced.
We also have SUSE Linux for one specific product.
When it comes to provisioning and patching, we use the satellite. It's acceptable when patching. I am satisfied with the provisioning and patching process as it's easy to manage. We don't use Insight, and I don't know about it. We don't use the Linux image builder or System Roles; we use our own Ansible Playbook to build a system.
We have all the automation set up for server provisioning and patching. We have the web console, but we don't really use its tools. We use our own Ansible Playbook, which allows us to manage and customize. We have many customizations. All the agents are installed for compliance, IP setup, file system creation - everything is automated.
When we create a VM, it only takes running the playbook and clicking a button. It takes about two minutes of work, and the automation handles the rest. In about two hours, the VM is up and running. If we use their tools, there are many limitations for customization, and we can only build an OS, but for the rest, we still have to run the automation. That's why we don't use those tools.
I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a six out of ten.