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Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Score8.9 out of 10

488 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a Linux distribution mainly used in commercial data centers.


Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 488 ratings of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)'s features
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Top Performing Features

  • Operating System Security

    The measures and features within the OS that protect data and resources from unauthorized access, threats, and vulnerabilities.

    Category average: 8.9

  • System Update Frequency

    How often the operating system receives patches or upgrades to improve functionality, fix bugs, and enhance security.

    Category average: 8

  • Software Application Management

    The handling of software applications by the OS, including their installation, execution, resource use, and termination.

    Category average: 8

Areas for Improvement

  • File Management

    The system's method of storing, organizing, retrieving, and securing data in files and directories on storage devices.

    Category average: 8

Reviews

What users are saying about Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
View all reviews

RHEL Review.

Incentivized
Kamal Jaisi Thapa
System Administrator in Information Technology at Lumen Technology (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use RHEL for Virtualization and deploy VMs and configure applications and services in a reliable, secure, smooth, and quick way to ensure customer needs are met efficiently and on time. We use it as the base operating system for almost every service we provide, from Repo and Ansible to log aggregation and Security Scan tools. The scope and scalability is immense without getting too deep into the actual work. Overall, it is an amazing service, and I would always recommend the product to everyone.

Pros

  • Easy to configure.
  • Works well with cross platform.
  • Provides multiple options for developers.
  • Great resources and documentation, including an open source community for testing and training.

Cons

  • One thing that can be made a little more efficient is making resources, especially troubleshooting resources, more readily available without having to create a Red Hat account or credentials every time.

Return on Investment

  • RHEL has been great as far as return on Investment is concerned.
  • It has been greater because it provides stable, reliable, secure, easy-to-deploy, configure, and scalable products.
  • Easy to integrate with other products.

Usability

Other Software Used

Microsoft Windows

RHEL Review Exelon

Incentivized
Matt Sargent
Principal Systems Engineer in Engineering at Exelon (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use RHEL throughout our division, 1700+ servers within a secure utility industry environment. We standardized to RHEL from various platforms like AIX, HPUX and Solaris due to being industry standard unix style OS that had our primary application vendor support as well a number of other secondary platform vendors.

Pros

  • OS Tech Support is responsive to our needs
  • As an industry standard our vendors all comply with RHEL framework
  • Timely Package release schedule

Cons

  • Support Docs can be untimely at times
  • RHEL is separating from previous open source downstream providers that we rely on

Return on Investment

  • Since we switched to Red Hat Compatible Kernel supported by Oracle we have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars while still gaining the RedHat quality package support
  • Application vendor support is very streamlined

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Oracle Linux

Other Software Used

Nagios Core, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

RHEL is great

Incentivized
Ben Wismans
Pre-Sales Consultant in Sales at Proxy Managed Services (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a Managed Service Provider doing 24/7 management on open source infrastrucutre. RHEL is one of our core components in our offering. We use RHEL as our basic Linux platform where we automate using Ansible for all applications running for our end customers.

Pros

  • Robust
  • Broad ecosystem
  • Patch lifetime cycles
  • Satellite integration

Cons

  • More integrations with applications, logon options

Return on Investment

  • Positive impact. We try to move all customer Linux workloads to RHEL to have one standard offering.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, CentOS Linux, AlmaLinux OS, Rocky Linux, Debian OS and Ubuntu

Other Software Used

Kubernetes, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, GitLab

My Red Hat Review

Incentivized
Cedrick Akechere
Product support in Information Technology at Homedepot (5001-10,000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it as the main OS to run our application.

Pros

  • Run applications
  • application management
  • Application deployment
  • Security

Cons

  • Will like to see more AI integration
  • AI development
  • Improvement
  • Scaling

Return on Investment

  • Scalability
  • Development
  • Improvement
  • Eh

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Ubuntu

Other Software Used

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

RHEL

Incentivized
Budd Lam
The Dogfather in Engineering at TD Bank (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use it in our deployment environments, and I have an enterprise workstation distro based on RHEL. We use it to enable our developers by bringing our deployment environment to developer workstations.

Pros

  • Stable.
  • Great Support.
  • Trusted

Cons

  • Newer packages for older systems (RHEL8).

Return on Investment

  • Stable support.
  • Basing my workstation distro on RHEL helped my company achieve ~100 M in productivity gains.
  • Negative: Learning curve for users that are not used to RHEL.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

vLLM and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Other Software Used

Debian OS, Fedora Linux