What is Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)?
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is an enterprise Linux operating system (OS) developed by Red Hat for the business market. RHEL, formerly known as Red Hat Linux Advanced Server, is certified with thousands of vendors and across hundreds of clouds.
RHEL provides users with a reliable, consistent foundation across environments. It is equipped with all the necessary tools to rapidly deliver application services and workloads. RHEL is based on a free, open source model like all Linux distributions.
In the past, RHEL was available at no cost, and users only had to pay for support. However, Red Hat has since created two versions of RHEL. One is a version with less frequent version releases. The other is Fedora, developed by the Fedora Project. It undergoes more frequent version releases and offers the latest available technologies.
A large community of developers actively contributes to Fedora. Red Hat takes features the Fedora Project develops and incorporates them into RHEL.
Although Red Hat makes its source code available for download, verbatim copying of the distribution is forbidden. However, users can view the source code and customize it as needed. The RHEL OS supports a range of workloads in physical, virtual and cloud environments. RHEL editions are available for servers, mainframe, SAP applications, desktops and OpenStack.