I would go for TinyTeX, which gives you a current TeX distribution. That's what I did at one client installation that used RHEL 7. The TeX Live available from the package repositories was just to old:
wget -qO- "https://yihui.name/gh/tinytex/tools/install-unx.sh" | sh -s - --admin --no-path
sudo cp -a .TinyTeX /usr/local/tinytex
sudo /usr/local/tinytex/x86_64-linux/tlmgr path add
sudo yum install http://mirrors.ctan.org/support/texlive/texlive-dummy/EnterpriseLinux-7/texlive-dummy-2012a-1.el7.noarch.rpm
sudo /usr/local/bin/tlmgr install pgf preview xcolor
If the server is not air-gapped, you can install missing packages on the fly. Or you could use tlmgr to install the full TeX Live to be on the save side:
sudo /usr/local/bin/tlmgr install scheme-full
You can also install any subset of packages (or collections) that you might find useful. All this is done on the system level, so that users do not have to worry about installing anything. But if you do not install everything and users are able to reach out, they can use
tinytex::tlmgr('init-usertree') # only do this once
tinytex::tlmgr_install(c('koma-script', 'xcolor'), usermode = TRUE)
to install some packages locally.