RedHat Linux- a very good alternative for Server Development
April 16, 2018

RedHat Linux- a very good alternative for Server Development

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Currently, RHEL is deployed on a legacy blade server (Dell Poweredge 1950) for testing Redmine project management system to track research projects, as well as to test the defectiveness of Redmine in replacing our current production ticketing system.

In Addition to Redmine, we also use Cockpit on RHEL (in our test/development), which functions as a makeshift NOC
  • Stability
  • Admin workflows
  • Will boot on hardware that other systems may not boot on (especially on legacy systems)
  • Upgrading
  • RPM is getting old
  • I'd like to see RHEL move away from rpms, and use a faster system such as apt
  • Speed of deployment
  • Speed of configuration
  • Access to specific packages versions not found on Debian, et. al
For our particular environment, Red Hat worked extremely well due to its orientation towards a server/professional environment. Distros such as Ubuntu (yes, even server)-which are based on Debian- tend to have issues with open/non-open software, and this can create issues with stability, accessibility and dependencies. In addition, Red Hat is making moves (as a corporation) towards meeting the needs of the current server market, making the company and it's offering an attractive offer for server/test environments.
In our current configuration, Red Hat works well as legacy-centric OS: not running virtualization, but offering bare-metal testing of services and software. For example, being able to run a legacy version of Red Hat can give you access to tool-chains (compilers, assemblers, etc) that are not available today (because as tech moved on, they became broken), and having that ability works well. Also- our server is a single-core, dual processor unit, with 8GB/1GB stick RAM, and 500 GB HD (all low-end specs, now), and Red Hat (v19) booted with no problems, and even booted back up on its HD as a rescue environment.