We deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-prem and in the cloud as a fallback.

We are a private cloud provider and we host Linux ourselves because they are tough to manage.

We offer our customers the option to host their Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Azure or on our private cloud.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's built-in security features help simplify risk reduction. Red Hat offers a subscription service that provides critical security updates within 24 hours. The service also includes an excellent database of known security vulnerabilities. If a CVE identifier is known for a vulnerability, it can be entered into the web interface. The web interface will then indicate whether Red Hat Enterprise Linux is affected by the vulnerability and what steps need to be taken to fix it. The fix will be included in the next security update. This is a valuable security feature that helps organizations to stay up-to-date on security patches and mitigate risk.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux is beneficial for keeping our organization agile. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and 9 include Podman, a newer software similar to Docker. Podman was built to address the problems that Docker had with creating and running containers, and it also includes the support of Red Hat. There is a good synergy between Red Hat and Podman.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has helped improve our organization. We provide a service to our clients, which they pay for each month. This service includes our support. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a stable operating system, so we do not have to provide much support. When we do need to provide support, it is usually for an application, not for the operating system.

I can build with confidence and ensure availability across physical and virtual cloud infrastructures using Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premises since 2008 without any problems. It is easy to automate. Virtualization is always present, so I work with virtual machines. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very easy to deploy on a virtual machine. We can create a virtual machine, and if we are working with VMware, we can create a template to use for new systems. There is no need for a classic installation.

The updates are the most valuable feature. In the past, we had 800 or 900 Linux systems with Red Hat, and all of the systems were updated every night. In the 14 years, we have only had ten issues with the updates.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a good configuration.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is secure but the security always has room for improvement.

Scaling can be complicated and has room for improvement.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for 14 years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

I give the stability an eight out of ten.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux a seven out of ten. 

Updating Red Hat Enterprise Linux from version 8 to 9 is a complex and time-consuming process. It is often easier to install a new server with Red Hat Enterprise Linux nine and migrate our data and applications. However, if we only need to resize the CPU or memory of our existing server, we can do so using the hypervisor without having to reboot.

Red Hat support is fast, and they are capable of answering 90 percent of our questions.

Positive

We previously used Debian, Ubuntu, and SUSE Linux. In our case, if we wanted a conservative Linux system that did not have the newest version, these were perfect systems. However, if we wanted to install them on our laptops or on our clients, they were the wrong solution. We switched to Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the Red Hat support. Debian also offers its own support. Ubuntu does not offer direct support, so we were required to order it through another company. SUSE had other problems that we did not want to deal with. Red Hat Enterprise Linux support has been very helpful to our back-end admins.

The initial setup is complicated, but with Red Hat Enterprise Linux nine, there is a graphical web interface where we can create a new image every week. We have created a golden template that enables us to update the image every month and upload it to both our private and public clouds for usage. 

The deployment time depends on whether we have a template or not. With a template, deployment can take between five and ten minutes. If we have to install the software, the time it takes depends on our internet bandwidth. Ten gigabits of bandwidth can take around 15 minutes to install.

The implementation was completed in-house.

As a provider, we must follow a different licensing model. We charge €2,000 per system for three years. Each month, we provide Red Hat with a number of new and old systems. Red Hat then invoices us based on the number of systems in use that month. This only applies to our cloud customers.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the best thing I have.

We always install a minimized Red Hat Enterprise Linux system for our customers. If they require more features, we provide them as requested.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the most perfect OS I have ever worked with. It is nice knowing when we have to use the OS and when we don't.

All Linux solutions are open source, but Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a commercial product that includes support and frequent updates. Red Hat Enterprise Linux can be downloaded for free, but it is not recommended to use it without a subscription, as it will not receive security updates or bug fixes. Red Hat reinvests a portion of the subscription revenue back into open-source projects, making it possible for other organizations to use these technologies for free.

Maintenance requirements depend on our needs. If we only want to have a server and install updates every night, no additional maintenance is required. Red Hat Enterprise Linux does not require any special support. However, if we want to ensure that the system time is always correct, that all updates are installed within a month, and that the system reboots after updates are installed, we will need to perform some additional maintenance tasks. These tasks can be automated to ensure that our system is always running smoothly. We currently have three people for the maintenance. We currently have 900 systems.

I recommend evaluating multiple Linux solutions and conducting a proof of concept because, although Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a great operating system, it may not be the best choice for every organization. I do not recommend using Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a new laptop because the versions included in Red Hat Enterprise Linux are typically two to four years old. This is because Red Hat Enterprise Linux is designed to be a stable OS, and newer versions may not have been fully tested and may have issues. If we have a server or software that is certified for Red Hat, then I would always recommend using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Our use cases are pretty broad. We develop the automation that provisions the VMs, and then anyone in the company can request the VM for whatever intended purposes.

Red Hat Support is really good. Support has a fast response time. The product has good security. We deal with very urgent issues. The response time should be optimal if the issue requires Red Hat Support. 

My company is a utility company. Outages are a major issue for us. A faster response time is very important to get the applications back up so we can keep up with our production time. Red Hat's documentation is always really good.

As a software developer, documentation is very important to me. The solution should provide better documentation.

The solution is very stable.

The product is scalable. We're able to provide as many VMs as we like. We never run into an issue with how many VMs we are provisioning.

Support can always be improved. I rate the product’s support an eight or nine out of ten.

Positive

The solution can get pretty pricey depending on how many machines we're licensing but for a good reason.

We purchased the solution from Red Hat. We use Packer by HashiCorp to build our templates. I am a junior developer. I have been employed with my company for about five months. I don't know the initial issues that led to us choosing Red Hat Enterprise Linux as our Linux solution. I speak from a developer’s perspective because I deal with Ansible.

The product has really good built-in security. The product provides good support, which helps us manage downtime and get the service back up and running, thus producing more money.

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

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. 

We are running our critical applications on it. We are using versions 7, 8, and 9, and we are running our workload on private clouds. We are currently testing Azure, but we don't have the production workload on it. 

By implementing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we wanted to solve some of the reboot problems of Windows. Every patch on Windows affected our applications because the system had to be rebooted. Red Hat Enterprise Linux has improved the uptime of the applications.

For our company, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a very secure operating system. It's much better than the Windows system. It's great for us. SELinux is a great tool to protect us from attackers. SELinux is the most important for us.

We have been Agile for two years, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux has been a part of it.

Its stability is most valuable. I'm a technical guy, and I love Linux. For me, it's the best platform.

Writing SELinux policies is sometimes very hard if you want to deploy a new application on it.

I started working in 2006, and my first job was administering the Red Hat Enterprise Linux system. 

It's very stable.

Its scalability is extremely good. You can scale it everywhere if you want. We have 600 to 700 Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. 

The support from Red Hat is very good. The response time is rather low. We have premium support, and we sometimes get an answer to our questions in one hour. If you explain to the support guy your problem, you will get the current answer. Overall, I'd rate them a nine out of ten because you sometimes get someone who doesn't understand your question.

I don't know about the knowledge base of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but I know the knowledge base of OpenShift is very good now. In the past, it was updated in one single version, whereas now, the change is there for each major and minor version. There is separate documentation, and that's much better than in the past.

Positive

It's getting better and better. In the past, versions 3 and 4 were very complex, but now, it's very easy to do it. We are now creating images and deploying it on our VMware farms, and it's much easier than making a PXE boot from our bare metal systems. 

We evaluated other solutions. We went for Red Hat Enterprise Linux because of better handling. It might also have been cheaper, but I'm not sure. My company decided to go with Red Hat.

As an operating system, I would rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.

As a whole, our organization is using it on Bare Metal on-prem and the private cloud, and then also in more than one public cloud environment. We probably have all three cloud providers. We definitely have Azure and Google Cloud. The environment that I support has about 40 apps in one cloud or another, but the organization as a whole definitely has hundreds of apps in Google Cloud or Azure. They're predominantly in Azure. The Google Cloud adoption is pretty recent compared to our Azure utilization.

I'm supporting a capital markets environment. A substantial portion of my environment is still Bare Metal at Colos. I'm sure on the application side, there's plenty of JBoss in our environment. There have been recent conversations around OpenShift on-prem that I'm working on, and our enterprise cloud teams are looking at or are using ARO in the cloud. In the next year, our use of the Ansible Platform will go from zero to full throttle as quickly as we can make that happen. We found the event-driven Ansible very interesting.

They've helped us work on employing technologies suitable to our various use cases. We're pretty slow adapters of containers, but that seems to be changing fairly quickly at the moment. That certainly gives us portability for workloads. They helped us with some aspects there, and they've helped us with a lot of automation conversation at the summit this week as well around Ansible.

When it comes to resilience in terms of disaster recovery, the operating system is robust. If it fails, it's probably an app issue. The majority of work in any of our DR scenarios is dependent on whether we have got cold standby or hot standby. If it's hot, the data replication is already there, and things are already spinning. Maybe it's on or you turn it on. Other times, you may have to start up something. Nearly all of those things are application architecture decisions as opposed to dependencies or things from an OS perspective, but in terms of the ecosystem for managing our Linux environment, using Satellite and so on has been very good.

I prefer it to Windows because of the level of configuration, level of control, and the ability to see the performance of processes on a given system. I prefer the control over logging and the ability that logging gives you to investigate a problem.

Its community is also valuable. It's open source, and Red Hat-supported streams are also valuable.

The level of communication we've got with them is fantastic. 

The integration with the apps and support could be better.

A colleague was talking about having some recommendations for the Ansible Cloud on the console and having some way of identifying your dev or prod path and whether you've got read or execute access to a playbook. There were different things like that, and they made a lot of sense, especially if you're in a dev or prod environment because mistakenly running something in prod would be a huge issue. There could be something that Red Hat configures, or there could be a text field where organizations can add labels to a part of the console to distinguish that for themselves. Those would be things that would be useful. I can't imagine it's hard to implement but being able to know which environment you're in matters a ton.

As a part of my professional career, I've been using it since 2004. I joined my current organization in 2018. It has been almost five years since I've been working with Red Hat Enterprise Linux in the security environment of our organization.

It's stable. We rarely have our systems crashing.

It's pretty easy and getting easier. It's not an OS issue. In terms of scalability, even while running our trading apps, we don't run into limitations related to the OS. Our limitations are more hardware-defined, and even then, we're running Red Hat Enterprise Linux on servers with eighty cores and almost a terabyte of RAM, and the OS doesn't have any issues.

Their knowledge base is great. There are lots of times when we don't even have to open a support case because we find what we're looking for.

I've spent a lot of time with the Red Hat account team over the past nine months. They've helped me understand products. They've helped develop the skills of my team. They've helped us with technology conversations with other parts of my organization. They've been hugely supportive of the technology conversation we're having with other parts of the bank.

They've been over and above the expectations in most cases. I'd rate them a ten out of ten. I don't know if it could be better. It has been extremely good. They've been extremely helpful in reaching out and figuring out what they can contribute. The account manager that they have working with us is a former colleague, so it's a really smart decision because we have a very good relationship with the guy. He knows our environment. It has been extremely positive.

It's a growing relationship with Red Hat. We have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a very long time, and I don't know if we can even compare it to the other OS vendors, but having the account team working with us with that level of experience with our environment helps them work with us. It helps us accomplish what we're trying to do. It has been a very good partnership.

Positive

We get our licenses directly through Red Hat.

We haven't used the image builder tool or insights, but it's something that we might explore in the coming months. 

I'd rate it a ten out of ten. It's very customizable and very supportive. It never seems to crash. There could be better integration with apps, but from an OS perspective, it's excellent.

It's pretty much everything that we have. We don't have a lot of Windows in our environment.

I've been using it a lot for several years. In the past, I ran a small web hosting company, and we used it for web servers, mail servers, FTP servers, and other things like that. After that, I was in casinos, and those were mostly Windows, but here, it's a lot of Linux, and it's all Red Hat. In my team, we just build it and make sure it keeps running, and the application teams do what they do.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on-premises. We support the in-house server-based things, and we have another team that supports all the cloud-based things, so I don't have a lot of visibility into the cloud.

In terms of the version, we're trying to phase out version 7. We just brought in version 8. Our Satellite is a little bit behind. By the time that gets caught up, our version 8 should be a little bit more solid, and then they can start testing version 9.

I haven't been on this team for a very long time. I've only been on this team for a couple of years, and it was already in place. In the past, we used it to get the stability and the support that we needed because, for a web hosting company, it was either IIS or Apache, and that was back in the NT days, so obviously, we went with Apache. I find it a better server operating system, so that's what we use.

I don't use it in a hybrid cloud environment, but my organization does. I like its built-in security features when it comes to simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance. All the firewall features and iptables have been fine for me. SELinux has been great for me. With the hosting that we used to do, SELinux was great because we had to share files with customers. It made it easy to make sure that files stayed secure and only changed by whoever needed to touch them.

I just use it. I'm strictly into command lines, and they just do what I need them to do, and I know how to use them. Everything is just stable and works well. 

It works fine for me, and it does what I need already. It does everything I needed to do, and it has for so many years. The only change that stumped me was the networking in version 9. I preferred the ifconfig way of doing things, but the system changes of it have grown on me. I preferred the ifconfig way because of familiarity. I knew how to manipulate things. I knew how to get things running and stay running and script ways to keep them running and notify me if the thing went wrong. My only gripe has been the networking change and the inability to use ifconfig anymore. I talked to some people, and they did point out that it's good if you're moving from one environment to another environment—like a laptop, but for servers, I don't need that. I just put my config file where I can find it and make the changes that I need.

I've been in this organization for a couple of years, but I've been using Red Hat since version 3. It has been a long time.

The stability has been pretty great. There are some things that we're still working on, but once we solve them, I know they'll remain solved.

Scalability has been great too because when we need more, we just add more, and we're good.

They've been great. I've worked with them a lot lately. They've been a ten out of ten. They're always there for us, and they answer us quickly.

Positive

I've personally used everything from Slackware to OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Red Hat, Fedora, and Ubuntu. I've used everything.

I like the way that everything is predictable with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. You know what you're getting. You know where everything is, and you know that you can find support if you need it. When we're upgrading or if we're adding something, I always know where I could find what I need to find.

I would think that we have seen an ROI. Our licensing has been very fair, but I don't have a lot of visibility into that.

I like my developer account. The free sixteen licenses that they give with the developer account are great because that gives me the ability to keep using it at home instead of trying CentOS or something like that. Once CentOS went away or changed, I had the ability to just make a developer account and spin up my entire lab in Red Hat, which made it better anyway because that's what we use at work, and now I have a one-to-one instead of a clone-to-one.

I've been trying to find a reason to use containers, but I just can't. I know our company uses it a lot, and they love it. They love the ability to shift things around and bring down servers when they want, and all of that, but for my own use cases, I haven't had a reason.

Overall, I'd rate Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten. Everything is great.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is connected to our internal private cloud that is air-gapped.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system on our network management and data management servers. It is our server operating system of choice for any type of hardware that needs to be reliable and stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux solved our need for automation and running containers. It is the most stable open source operating system available. When compared to other OSes, it is reliable and works well. This is important for my line of work, where I need to be able to reliably transfer files across thousands of miles. I need to do this quickly, and I have found that other OS solutions, such as Windows Server and Ubuntu Linux Server, are not as reliable or as quick. I have found myself constantly having to troubleshoot problems with these other OSes, and there is often not a lot of documentation available to help me.

The Red Hat Enterprise Linux knowledge base is awesome. Everything is documented, so I could easily find the information I needed to troubleshoot my misconfiguration issue. The knowledge base even provides suggestions for likely causes, which was helpful because most of the time, when something isn't working right on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux system, it's a configuration issue.

Security is one of the benefits of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is secure from the start, and it does not take long to configure it to meet government security standards. It also performs well during the staging process, and it does not break or cause services to be lost. In contrast, other operating systems often lock accounts, break, and cause services to be lost.

Simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance is straightforward and uncomplicated. There is plenty of documentation to help us, so if we get lost, we can refer to it to find our way.

The portability of applications and containers built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes it easier for our company to stay agile. We have found that our applications and programs run just fine on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which provides a lot of supportability.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux's most valuable feature is that it comes with all the tools we need to set up and maintain an enterprise-grade system. Even if we install the minimal version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we will still have everything we need to get up and running quickly and easily. And if we ever need to restore our system from a backup, Red Hat Enterprise Linux makes it easy to do so, whether we are restoring from a scratch build or a backup that is a few weeks old.

A feature that I would like to see in the image builder is the ability to open the image in live mode and access a command line interface. This would allow me to immediately apply the necessary security settings required by the STIG. By doing so, I can deploy the image with the confidence that vulnerabilities present in the live network cloud service are closed before deployment, rather than applying the settings afterward as suggested in the example by Red Hat.

Ideally, I would prefer to deploy an operating system that already has all the necessary configurations in place. This would involve accessing a command line interface, adjusting configuration files as needed, setting up banners, and establishing user accounts. After making these changes, I would create an image and deploy it. I've noticed that the current image builder is primarily designed for commercial use, but as a DoD user, I have different requirements. Therefore, having an emulator or virtual terminal that allows me to interact with the kernel and make live changes, which can then be saved to create a customized ISO, would be an excellent feature to have. It would be great if Red Hat Enterprise Linux had a similar capability. Interestingly, Ubuntu Linux does offer this functionality with its "Custom Ubuntu Basic ISO Creator" (CUBIC).

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for two years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a scalable operating system. Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers a wide range of options and features, and we are only just beginning to explore its full potential.

The initial setup is straightforward. I installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux using the stick method. I had to create nine different partitions, all of which were encrypted. This is where things got a little complicated. We need to decide whether to create a LUKS partition or partition and build our image on top of a LUKS partition. Initially, I was individually encrypting each partition using the "encrypt" option. However, this is not ideal because we cannot grow or shrink an LVM partition that is on an encrypted partition. Once the partition is created, it is set in stone. So, I needed to figure out how to encrypt just the partition and then create an LVM partition on top of the encrypted partition, such as SDA3. This was a bit of a challenge, and there is not a lot of documentation on how to do this. The documentation that is available is a bit confusing, and I got lost a few times. Once I figured it out, it was not too bad. The entire deployment process takes about 20 minutes.

We have seen a return on investment in all areas with Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including productivity. We use it in our daily operations in almost all of our systems. In one form or another, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is running on our systems. If we are not running Red Hat Enterprise Linux, our systems are unstable.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.

For those who are looking at other open source cloud-based operating systems for Linux, I would recommend Red Hat Enterprise Linux. It is well-documented and has a large pool of information available. We can also use CentOS content with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The pool of information for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is far greater than some other open-source solutions.

The environment in which we deployed the solution is enterprise-level.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux specifically was a hard requirement for certain software that we wanted to utilize. In fact, purchasing Red Hat’s enterprise version was necessary to run AP. That was the primary objective.

Apart from that, the robust networking capabilities offered by Red Hat Enterprise Linux were highly valuable. They have numerous partnerships and dedicated efforts in low-latency technologies, which are particularly beneficial for trading firms. They possess extensive expertise in external tuning and similar aspects.

Overall, the reliability stands out the most for me. While the package selection might be somewhat restricted, it is highly integrated and cohesive.

I'm really excited about some of the developments happening in the workstations and the Fedora Silverblue space. There are advancements like rpm-ostree and the OCI container format, which enable deploying RHEL in new ways.

As we have numerous developer workstations, being able to deploy them in an image-based format is highly desirable. This would allow us to use the "toolbox" concept, where developers can choose any desired operating system within the toolbox. Some of our developers also work with Ubuntu and Oracle Linux. Having a consistent developer platform with full pseudo permissions and zero permissions within that container or toolbox would be beneficial.

Additionally, having an image that includes all the necessary software and provisioning it so that subsequent updates provide the updated image, would significantly enhance the developer experience. It would be great if teams could make modifications and changes to the image, like rebasing. I think it would be an awesome feature.

Let me provide an example of why this would be valuable for Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation. We recently switched from one security software application to another similar application on our workstations. We had to manually remove the unwanted software and install the new one. It was manageable for servers or edge devices, but for remote devices that are not always on the network or VPN, it became a cumbersome task to reach out to each device and remove and install the software. If we could update an image with the old software removed and the new software installed, and then allow users to update their image, it would simplify the process for everyone. Currently, it's possible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Edge, but it would be fantastic if this capability could be extended to Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation as well. That's what would be really cool.

The company has been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a significant period of time. As for myself, it's been around five years or so. I have also contributed to GNOME. About ten years ago, I was one of 12 individuals who wrote documentation for GNOME 3.

I don't think we are leveraging Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud. Since we are primarily involved in trading, our infrastructure is predominantly on-premises, accounting for about 80%. We have our own data centers. While we do have some cloud workloads and our cloud presence is growing, it isn't a major focus in my role. I serve as the lead engineer for 700 developer workstations that run Linux. For parts that use Red Hat Enterprise Linux on the cloud, we are split between different cloud providers, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

For the most part, we are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, which we support alongside Ceph and a bit of AAP. Apart from that, there is still a significant amount of CentOS 7 in use as people are gradually transitioning away from it.

The stability is good. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

The scalability is impressive. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

The customer service and support were pretty good. We encountered an issue, and we involved some people for assistance. In retrospect, we should have engaged higher-level support sooner for that specific issue. Support can be challenging when you're dealing with Linux problems, especially in our environment where we have a lot of skilled engineers; it feels like we're already operating beyond the normal troubleshooting space. So having access to escalated help when we need it is valuable. The support fixed our problem.

Positive

The initial setup was complex because we were using a newer version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for the server team's workloads. Normally, we go with Red Hat Enterprise Linux for hardware, but this time we got a better deal from a different vendor whose IPMI Redfish interface wasn't as advanced as Red Hat Enterprise Linux's. This caused some issues specifically related to deploying the newer version. However, once we managed to overcome most of those challenges, the use of Ansible for OS deployment became more straightforward.

For the OS component, we worked directly with Red Hat. However, we utilized a company called Bits, based in Elk Grove, Illinois, to handle the hardware provisioning and setup.

We've seen an ROI. For instance, we were able to run a storage workload on one cluster that had an immense capacity. I calculated it to be the equivalent of either 16,000 iPads or 64,000 iPads. It was a significant amount. This capability is beneficial for us as we deal with a lot of trading data. We can perform analytics and machine learning workloads on it, which aids in compliance and enables traders to make more informed trades. It's a win-win situation.

The compliance aspect ensures that we stay out of trouble, and the machine learning capabilities help traders make better trades, which ultimately contributes to our success. I'm glad that they make money. It's wonderful.

Red Hat is making efforts to simplify the SKU system, which is a positive development. It's beneficial to have the flexibility to allocate a certain budget to explore different licenses within the Red Hat ecosystem. We can try out products and decide if they meet our needs. If they don't, we can decommission the corresponding SKU. I have noticed that we have some Red Hat entitlements that we are not currently utilizing, so having granularity in the SKU structure would be an advantage.

For our specific use cases, certain products like SAP, AAP, and OpenShift require Red Hat Enterprise Linux. That played a significant role in our decision.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux’s built-in security features, in terms of simplifying risk reduction and maintaining compliance, are an area where I've observed some of the developments with Satellite and Red Hat Insights. But since we have different operating systems, such as Windows, Mac, Linux, and a mix of server and desktop environments, I'm not sure if Satellite or Insights can integrate seamlessly with all these platforms. Currently, we use a different product to assess our CVE vulnerabilities across hosts, including phones and other devices. I do find the discussions about software supply chain security intriguing. Focusing on that aspect seems really promising.

The portability of applications and containers, specifically for those already built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, seems pretty good. Red Hat offers UBI images that are freely available without the need for licensing. Red Hat Enterprise Linux and container platforms provide a solid setup for portability.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux as an infrastructure support operating system across both x86 and s390 platforms. Specifically, we are running it on x86 Intel and Linux s390 mainframe on Zynq.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a stable operating system. We recently upgraded the majority of our systems from Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8. We were able to automate most of the upgrade process and did not encounter any major issues. As a result, we were able to bring our systems up to date quickly and easily. This is a major advantage of using Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

From an automation standpoint, we have been able to automate some of our patching workflows. This has definitely saved us time and money.

From a security and compliance standpoint, it is easy to maintain compliance. This is mostly accomplished by patching Red Hat Enterprise Linux on a frequent basis. The availability of security patches is also quick, which allows us to keep up with our client requirements quickly. Red Hat usually does a good job of making fixes available in a timely fashion, so we can remediate high-priority issues when they arise.

From a containerization standpoint, Docker and Podman now give us the ability to move workloads and structures around with little effort. It is very flexible and consistent, and the results also provide us with a stepping stone as we move towards an orchestration platform like OpenShift. Our ability to run Podman on servers and then migrate those Podman deployments to OpenShift is very beneficial.

The most valuable features are ease of support and the ability to run a read-only course on the operating system.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easy to maintain. We currently use Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with Docker for containerization. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8, we are moving to Podman, which is a native container runtime that is part of the operating system. 

I suggest that Red Hat move to a continuous delivery model instead of major releases. I know that this is a trend for many middleware products. We do not have a major release network. We only have monthly or quarterly roll-on releases on our continuous delivery model, which reduces the impact of a major version. This would probably be the easiest change to make.

The technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using Red Hat Enterprise Linux for two years.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is stable.

Since we run a number of hypervisors for all of our real systems, I believe that a lot of the scalability comes from a level higher than the operating system. However, Red Hat Enterprise Linux can accommodate these tools.

Red Hat support could be improved, and they should have a better relationship with IBM and VMware. This is because a lot of what we do involves working with IBM, both from a hardware standpoint and from a hypervisor standpoint. We have a long history with IBM, and we are now starting to work more with Red Hat on OpenShift private cloud solutions and other tooling. However, Red Hat and IBM are not on the same page. They are still very different companies, and they don't always know what the other one is doing. This can lead to contradictory information, inaccurate information, and frustration for customers. I think there is a relationship between Red Hat and IBM that could be improved. If Red Hat and IBM could work together more effectively, it would put customers at ease and make them more confident that they could get the work done. It would also help IBM and Red Hat to better understand each other's products and services, which would lead to better customer support.

For example, we recently had an incident that started as a severity two on the scaling. A number of our account representatives called and emailed us, saying, "Hey, we wanted to let you know that you have an open case. We need some help with this." The incident was not a production outage, but it was preventing us from doing something, so there was an indirect production impact. After about ninety minutes of back-and-forth communication, we were told, "Okay, go ahead and bump it up to severity one. That should get traction." We did not hear from anyone for four hours. This does not happen every time, but in this case, it needed to be dealt with well before four hours. It made things more difficult than they needed to be. Sometimes the support is an eight out of ten, and sometimes it is a four.

The end result was still good because they acknowledged what happened and got everyone together to resolve it but it was not done in an efficient way.

Neutral

The initial setup of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is very straightforward. It is not much different from any other Linux operating system. Most of the things we need to consider when deploying Linux are relatively standard. Therefore, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is easy to deploy and maintain. If we know how to administer Linux operationally, then Red Hat Enterprise Linux should be easy to deploy.

I do not know enough to give a comprehensive answer, but other operating systems are in use at my company because they have more favorable licensing terms. This is a major factor in why we do not use Red Hat Enterprise Linux everywhere.

We evaluated SUSE Linux Enterprise and a few others. Depending on the computing platform, it is sometimes better and sometimes not. For some of our environments that are running on s390, SUSE Linux Enterprise gives us a better price point. However, for some of our other environments, such as x86 on VMware, it is more valuable. It is a better financial move for us in those cases. Therefore, the value of SUSE Linux Enterprise changes depending on the computing architecture.

I give Red Hat Enterprise Linux a ten out of ten.

We have a requirement to have a Linux operating system.

I'm not sure how our developers are building their images. I believe they use some desk start products.

We use SUSE Linux Enterprise for Linux on the mainframe. In a particular enclave, we have some government contracts where we use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a number of reasons, including licensing for hosts. These hosts are hosted with OpenShift. We use Red Hat Enterprise Linux for all our Bastion hosts and OLS for our other hosts.

The Red Hat knowledge base is generally an eight or nine out of ten, but it can be difficult to get the information we need. The initial level of support is a six or seven, but it improves as we escalate the issue.

We use the product to use the virtual servers.

Compared to Windows, the solution is much simpler. The product is easy to use.

The solution should provide demos so that users can learn to use it and improve their environments.

I have been using the solution for three to four years.

I have no complaints about the stability. It is good.

I have no complaints about the scalability.

We use the on-premises solution because we work for the government. We cannot use the cloud version because we have to maintain confidentiality. We are using versions six, seven, and eight. We also use Windows in our organization. Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.