What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?

We use open source. We only have a subscription for support.

My company has acquired five to ten licenses from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

The cost of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is reasonable.

The combined cost of implementing in hybrid and cloud environments to fulfill all our client's needs can be considerable.

We have to pay for the support and features. The distinguishing feature between open-source competitors and Red Hat Enterprise Linux is the comprehensive support that Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides. Red Hat Enterprise Linux no longer faces competition from HP and Digital in terms of support services, as these companies have ceased offering their solutions. IBM remains the sole competitor, but they recently acquired Red Hat, essentially consolidating the support landscape.

The pricing is competitive. It's not low, but it is in the market.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is expensive. We have changed the cloud provider's subscription to a pay-as-you-go model.

It is cost-effective.

The cost is based on each organization's budget and infrastructure.

The product is on the expensive side.

Its pricing is good and competitive.

As a developer, I pay around 10,000 Yen, which is around $100 per annum for support. SUSE and Red Hat are typically the same without standard support. The pricing is not a big deal. Enterprise customers will pay for the support. Enterprises have the money for one or two products like this that are reliable and supported. As a consultant, I advise customers to go for support. You mitigate risks by having support. For your personal usage, you can manage without support, but when it comes to the enterprise level, you need to delegate things to people, and it should be through the proper channel. You need a proper point of contact.

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.

It's pretty expensive, but I'm not familiar with the pricing of other vendors for their operating systems. I'd rate it a seven out of ten in terms of pricing. Red Hat Enterprise Linux's main advantage is the support that you get by purchasing their subscriptions.

Its licensing is pretty confusing. There are a lot of subscriptions, and it isn't always clear which subscription is the best, but with their support, it's easy to find the right one. Our customers sometimes buy it directly from the cloud provider, but most of the time, they have a hybrid infrastructure, so they already have some kind of subscription, and they use that subscription on the cloud.

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

The solution is a good value for money. They keep adding up essential features to the specific subscription plan. I am also not a big proponent of top-level open-source applications as they do not provide support services. Whereas, with Red Hat, I can call them for queries and get answers immediately. In comparison, open source doesn't have that facility. Even if you hire a support vendor, they just give their opinions and try to help but they don't own the project. At the end of the day, we have a 999.99% reliability of only 20 minutes a year of downtime with Red Hat. It is impossible to get that with open-source vendors as sometimes the applications might break if it doesn't notify about the changes on time. Conversely, Red Hat Enterprise Linux has a ten-year life cycle assurance, so we don't have to worry much. Also, we are in a TAM program. Thus, we can call the support team immediately for any issue.

The solution's price is reasonable. If you have a license for the support, they provide excellent services. The support team is always available for help in case of errors or system downtime issues.

I don't know about the pricing because I am not responsible for taking decisions about products used in the enterprise. Our clients use this product, and we use this product with the clients. In my home office, I use a free operating system. There is no support, but I can use it to practice. Our clients need support because it's used in the production environment. I don't know the price of the product, but I understand that with the support that Red Hat offers, compared to other operating systems, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is cheap.

Their licensing is quite okay. It isn't expensive, and it's slightly cheaper than Microsoft. Taking into account its features, its price is okay. Support is something that serious enterprises would want to have. The advantage of running an open-source tool is that you do not have to pay for the tool in terms of licensing, but you don't have support. In certain situations, you might need support. For example, when one of your systems goes down, but you do not have the expertise internally to recover it. Depending on the industry you're working with, having downtime might not be optimal or might be costly. It might even be costlier than paying for the support or licensing of Red Hat. Apart from support, for organizations that have some of their services exposed to the public internet, security is very important. They would want the patches for the latest common vulnerability exposures found to be affecting the particular systems they are running. So, support and security are the key features why any serious organization should choose Red Hat as opposed to an open-source tool.

It is pretty expensive, but it is worth it. Generally, in an enterprise environment, there is no cheap solution. This is coming from someone who is working with a company that provides a lot of solutions a bit cheaper than the industry standard. In the enterprise environment, I believe no solution is inexpensive, but RHEL is still pretty expensive. Additional costs that I am aware of are usually for support and setup. A lot of banks use RHEL. I've seen the cost of the support and setup. Some of them complain about it, but they also talk about how well it works. I have not compared the overall costs of open-source competitors to the overall costs of RHEL when it comes to supporting business operations over time. The only other distribution for which I have seen the pricing is AIX, which was a bit more expensive than RHEL.

I don't have any issues with the licensing or pricing. In general, OpenShift is a little more expensive. It's a bit expensive to have the number of containers we need and for disaster recovery but it's been worth the money because it's helped us get to the cloud faster.

The solution is moving away from its open source roots and licensing is a little bit of an issue.

When you are running your infrastructure on this, you can always find some discounts with local support, etc. There are always some discounts to match your budget. It is definitely affordable. When it comes to virtualization, there are different factors. There is not only Red Hat. There is also IBM, VMware, etc. The third-party vendors always manage to come up with a good offer. Our company can't say no to that, and it works out fine. We also have IBM AIX, and when you compare these two, there's a huge difference because IBM AIX's support is quite higher than Red Hat's.

The pricing of RHEL is very similar to other offers. We like the model that Red Hat makes available for subscription and support. There are some free parts, subscriptions that facilitate solution development and implementation, and then, when the solution is well-defined, we move into the paid support license. That kind of subscription is a good approach. The overall cost of RHEL versus its competitors is comparable. It's more or less the same as SUSE. But the support from Red Hat is better than you get from the others.

RHEL is competitive on-premises, but it's too expensive in the cloud. There are many cheap solutions for the cloud. In terms of upfront costs, open-source is more affordable and, in many cases, free. The long-term cost of support, staffing, and maintenance make it untenable.

RHEL's price seems to be consistently changing, depending on what you're after. We might need a more extended license to lock in a price if it keeps changing. It would be nicer if it stayed steady within a specific range, but it's negotiable. We try to negotiate, and maybe a more extended contract would be better. When comparing to other solutions, you must consider the reporting and security features. It's an expense that we need to pay in terms of compliance. When you talk with your partner companies or potential customers, they need to know that we're on the ball and keeping up.

For the basic operating system, its price is fair. It is not cheap, and it is also not expensive. For the OpenShift or OpenStack implementation, the cost is a little higher than what I would expect, but it is doable. For a storage solution, it is almost impossible to pay. In comparison to open-source competitors, RHEL has the most cost-effective open-source subscription model. The way I pay for everything, such as Ubuntu or RHEL, is very similar. When you compare how much money I put in for a customer, in terms of licensing, or even support, my margins with RHEL are really good. If I compare it with VMware or Hyper-V, which are not open source, the difference is totally insane.

The cost could be lower. Red Hat is considered a costly solution. It can be expensive if you want all the features in the license. A cheaper license would make Red Hat more accessible to a broader range of users. It's reasonable given the features and performance, but a lower price would encourage more people to adopt it.

The pricing is fair. We do a bunch of dev work and there is some free dev licensing out there that's great for doing proof of concept work. When that was brought out a couple of years ago we heard about it, but it didn't seem to have been communicated to our Red Hat representative. We would ask him about it and it seemed that they were confused. But the cost has been pretty stable over the years for what you get. We figure out what we need for servers, make our purchase, and then manage it all in Satellite. We just make sure we're using what we pay for.

Operating in the cloud space, we typically point our customers to pay-as-you-go licensing, which comes through the various cloud providers repository services.

This is not a cheap solution but it gets you the support if you ever need it. That said, it's nice to know that having Red Hat support is there but it's always stable so I hardly ever use it. The single subscription and install repository for all types of systems makes it simple to purchase and install Red Hat. We had Red Hat x86 before this, and when we wanted to purchase the newer version, their system made it easy to complete the purchasing and installation processes. There are a lot of other architectures available that we don't use, such as RSCT. They can be obtained from the repository but aren't applicable to us. In addition to the standard licensing fees, we pay for Smart Management. This gets the Satellite and Insights features, which I recommend. Overall, their subscription, process, and repository make for a streamlined purchase and installation process.

The prices are comparable, and good for what is being provided.

Because it's a very stable solution, if you have the knowledge in-house, go for a regular subscription. Otherwise, buy the Premium Support.

The licensing is a subscription model and the only product whose model I don't like is Ansible. At $100 per server, with 12,000 servers, it adds up.

There are special academic offerings for academic institutes, which is pretty good. We need these offerings. In my personal opinion, the prices are okay. However, for educational purposes, they could be lower. For example, in Germany, the budget in the education sector for IT is lower compared to the huge universities in the US. When you are only using the RHEL subscription system, it is okay. It can get complicated very quickly when you need multiple different subscriptions with a lot of SKUs. When someone is going to look into RHEL, I suggest starting with an individual developer subscription, which everyone can get for free. With developer subscriptions, you won't be able to contact support, but you have almost all of the important applications and features of RHEL for free. You are not allowed to build your whole production on it, but you are able to develop applications, test configurations, test the platform, and try out almost everything.

If you don't buy the Red Hat subscription, you don't get technical support, and you don't have all the updates. To have everything working like a charm, the cost that you pay for it is worth it. In Bolivia, we don't have the best internet connection. Therefore, we have a local service with all the packages, repositories, etc. We manage them locally, and because we have a subscription, we can update them. So, we have local repositories with all the packages and other things to make it easy for us to update all the servers. Without the Red Hat subscription, we cannot update anything.

It is more expensive than other vendors in terms of pricing and licensing, but because of its stability, I have to go with it.

The price is something that can be improved, as they are still being undercut. We are an educational institution and as such, what we pay is less than the average company. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees. Red Hat's single subscription and install repository for all types of systems is something that we're quite interested in because it's simpler and easy to manage hundreds of virtual machines. However, from a pricing standpoint, it's part of the problem because it's what Red Hat utilizes to explain why they cost more. The Oracle licensing of support for the same Red Hat product is cheaper, and it's cheaper to the level of significance that it makes it worthwhile. We have spoken with the salespeople at Red Hat about it, and they have said that there was nothing they could do. It's starting to become a question mark over the patching with version eight. We might be changing, but we're unlikely to be changing from Red Hat. It's more a case of who's running our support, be it Oracle or Red Hat. However, we would need to look at the numbers next time we renew, which is not until next year.

Pricing is always a critical factor for all IT departments. The cost of doing business is part of the nature of the job. If you're going to buy a bunch of Dell servers, for example, you have to take into consideration not just the licensing, but the hardware support and other things. The licensing with Red Hat is on par with other organizations like Microsoft. We buy our licensing in bulk, meaning we buy perhaps 1,500 licenses at a time. They changed their licensing structure over the last couple of years. It used to be per system, whereas now, it's all or nothing. We don't have a subscription, as they used to offer, because they moved away from that. We have a site license, which gives us a certain number of servers, perhaps 25,000, for the type of license that we have. That works really well for us. The way our structure is set up is that we just buy it by the tier system that they have, so if you have so many servers then you buy that tier and then you get so many licenses as part of that tier or enterprise package. There are additional fees for using other Red Hat tools, such as Ansible Tower. We use Satellite, and it uses Ansible on the backend. However, we use the vanilla Ansible out of the box, rather than the official Red Hat Ansible Tower, simply because we can't afford the licensing for it. Satellite bundles everything together nicely in their suite of tools but we have moved away from that because of the additional cost. This is one of the downsides to any operating system, not just Red Hat. Windows, for example, is the same way. They try to bill every organization for every license that they can by adding on different suites of tools that they charge for. A lot of organizations, especially the smaller ones, simply can't afford it, so they create workarounds instead. In our case, Ansible is freely available and we can use it without having to pay the fees for Red Hat's Ansible. The nice thing though, is that they give you the choice. Red Hat doesn't force you to buy the entire product. They still have Ansible entwined with their Satellite product. The point is that if you want the additional features and functionality then you have to buy their Ansible Tower product, but you can still use the basic product regardless. The fact that RHEL is open-source was a factor in us implementing it. This is an interesting time for Red Hat. The great thing about Red Hat for us was that we could use Red Hat and then we could use their free, commercial version, which is CentOS. It stands for Community Enterprise OS. Unfortunately, they are no longer going to push out CentOS and I think that 8.4 is the latest version of their free Red Hat distribution. When we first went to Red Hat, in all the organizations I've ever worked at, being able to test things was one of the key factors. We could spin up a CentOS, implement a proof of concept and do some testing before we actually went to use the licensed Red Hat version of the same product. The real plus was that we could do testing and we could do all these things on the free version without having to eat up a license to do a proof of concept before we actually invested money moving in that direction, using that particular product or service. Now that this ability has gone away, we are going to see how that pans out. I think Rocky Linux, they're hoping that that's going to be the next CentOS or free Red Hat. We'll see if that pans out or not but right now, it's a scary time for people that are dependent on CentOS for their free development environments, where we can just spin that up and play around. Right now, we're looking at how we're going to resolve that. It may be that we have to eat up a license so that we can spin up a machine that we just want to do a proof of concept. This is something that we don't know yet. I don't have an answer because we simply don't have enough data to make an assessment on that. Everything considered, having a free commercial version available, in addition to the paid product, is a big lure for us. They worked really well in tandem.

We have a site license on a yearly basis. Generally, we're okay with its price, but everything could be cheaper.

RHEL is a great place to go. They have a great thing that is not very well-known, which is called the Learning Subscription, which is a one-year all-you-can-drink access to all of their online self-paced courses as well as their certifications. While it is a premium to have the certifications as well, it is very cool to have that because you end up as a Red Hat certified engineer in a hurry. It is good to have the training because then you are fully versed in doing the Red Hat approach to the equation, which is a no-nonsense approach. Because it is a subscription, you can go elastic. This means you can buy a year, then you can skip a year. It is not like when you buy something. You don't buy it. You are paying for the support on something, and if you don't pay for the support on something, there is no shame because there are no upfront costs. It changes the equation. However, we have such growth right now on the Linux platform that we are reusing and scavenging these licenses. From a business standpoint, not having to buy, but just having to pay for maintenance, changes a lot of the calculations.

RHEL is expensive. The servers or cloud images are quite expensive. But I guess the client groups they target can afford that kind of a license. If you're a small business owner or a student and want to shift to RHEL, you must spend a lot of dollars. The developer version of RHEL has minimal functionality, but it's given away for free.

Red Hat Linux is inexpensive. Linux solutions are generally inexpensive.

In terms of the solution’s single subscription and install repository for all types of systems, we can have as many RHEL installations as we want because we have a specific subscription that entitles us to have as many RHEL services as we want. We pay for a subscription and with that we get RHEL and Satellite as well. The best thing to do is to go to developers.redhat.com and get free subscriptions for RHEL products, so you can try them out and see how they work before you go ahead and purchase or subscribe. As far as I know, there are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.