Which Red Hat Should Be Worn in the Enterprise? 710
weatherbug asks: "I've recently been appointed as a member of a team to help determine the direction our organization is headed with Red Hat Linux. Currently we're using multiple versions from Red Hat 6.x through Advance Server 2.1. However, now that Red Hat has effectively separated their distributions into a 'consumer' (Red Hat 8,9, etc) and 'enterprise' (Red Hat Adv. Server 2.x, etc), we
aren't sure which version we want to adopt. A Red Hat salesman recently told us that the 'consumer' version of Red Hat was mostly for hackers and hobbyists who weren't concerned about stability and wanted the most up-to-date software, while the 'enterprise' version would be more stable and have a five-year product lifetime. As a long time Linux system administrator, I feel that this is a sales tactic and that there really is no compelling reason for us to ever use the 'enterprise' version. After all, it is Linux and it is open source, and we have enough in-house talent to not need Red Hat support. Why would we ever need or care about a five-year product lifetime? Am I wrong, and if so, could you set us straight? We'd be interested to know what other large organizations have decided to do."
I'm more worried about... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh wait, nevermind...
Re:I'm more worried about... (Score:2, Insightful)
But seriously, folks. It's Linux. Either it's Open Source and companies with expertise can admin and update it themselves, or you're paying somebody else to do that for you. And why pay Red Hat big bucks unless you need their expertise? Are they going to stop chasing bugs in the consumer division because of the obvious conflict of interest with their revenue stream selling support? Red Hat can either sell one or the ot
Re:I'm more worried about... (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed. Some do, some don't. But those who don't, shouldn't.
Are they going to stop chasing bugs in the consumer division because of the obvious conflict of interest with their revenue stream selling support?
Um, this has *got* to be a troll. First off, any company that doesn't chase and fix bugs should (and will) go out of business. Second, selling support if *not* about fixing bugs, it's about set up, maintenance, and *applying* bug fi
Re:I'm more worried about... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is where you don't understand the differences between their "Enterprise" and "standard" editions...
First of all, microsoft doesn't chase and fix bugs, and they are not out of business. In fact, they are the most profiting company in this half of the world (probably the whole world).
Secondly, That is what RedHat means about a "5 year product life" It means that the "Enterprise" edition of their software will be supported for five years, as opposed to RedHat Linux 9.0's support which will last maybe 1.5 years if your lucky.
The point is that if you are a hobbiest, you will want the latest and greatest version of linux. And you will be forced to upgrade to the latest and greatest version if you want support (Read: patches and updates to the software). If you want support (Patches and updates) for more than a typical hobbiest needs, then you need to go with the "Enterprise" version, which will be officially supported by redhat with updates and security patches for at minimum of 5 years.
If you don't need the telephone support and just need updates and patches, I suggest bypassing redhat's services altogether and going with Debian Linux, which has simlar long term support networks in place by default.
The bottom line is that if you go with the "enterprise" version, RedHat will train and maintain a technical support staff that is capeable of troubleshooting your version of Enterprise Linux for five years. They will also release security updates to your version for five years. If you don't go enterprise, no matter what kind of support services you need, your version of Redhat will be defunct (read: no more security updates on unsupported versions) in probably less than a year. This is not good for enterprise servers that don't need to be upgraded to the latest and buggiest software every 9 months.
Re:I'm more worried about... (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the workstations in the company, you can use whatever you want. The most important machines are the servers and you would want support from RH on those. The support includes bugfixes, drivers etc and for a stable environment for the next 5 years, just as if you had bought Solaris, HP-UX, AIX or any other enterprise UNIX flavour.
Re:I'm more worried about... (Score:3, Interesting)
"'Are they going to stop chasing bugs in the consumer division because of the obvious conflict of interest with their revenue stream selling support?'
Um, this has *got* to be a troll. First off, any company that doesn't chase and fix bugs should (and will) go out of business."
My post was in the same context of what is described above in the origional post.
But I do agree with you on those points outside of this particular context.
Re:I'm more worried about... (Score:5, Interesting)
Another is this, and quite honestly, it's important. Controlled upgrades. As of now, there are multiple upgrades almost DAILY for various packages. How many are needed, critical (security), and how many are trivial and one doesn't care? How do you control upgrades over a large number of systems? RH AS provides solutions for upgrading your system.
FINALLY
RH AS also has some components from the 2.5 kernel that are tested and stable within their kernel. An example is the new job scheduler which more efficiently utilizes hyper-threading Intel XEON CPUs.
So it's a combination of expertise, services and some advanced kernel components. As for consumers, RH will support folks using the same model as with older versions -OR- you can use thier AS Workstation and they'll support that as well.
It's a pretty good product combination of SW, solution and service. HOWEVER (caveat) for the cost, I think it's outrageous, BUT for a large environment (like where I work) it makes sense if one can buy in bulk. Even then it's high, but once SuSE comes out with something similar we'll get some better pricing...
For right now, it's not windows and that's good enough for me.
Re:I'm more worried about... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm more worried about... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I'm more worried about... (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.redhat.com/mktg/which_rhl/
But most of the folks in this thread have summed it up just as well.
1) If you need 5-7 yr lifecycle, extended product/tech support, ISV certification, go with the Red Hat Enterprise Linux line
2) If you are more of a do-it-yourselfer, need more recent bells and/or whistles, have a smaller deployment, with less dependance on third party solutions go with Red Hat Linux (or the vendor that you already know, etc)
A few things I wanted to clarify:
When the fellow mentions the "stability" trade off, that means stability of the API/ABI, libraries, etc... not how often it crashes or not.
Also tech support and RHN are indeed available for both lines. There was a post that indicated that we took away RHN for his product. We limited the free/demo RHN product. While he could have purchased the full version, switching to BSD worked for him.
Lastly, for those who have pointed out the gap we seem to have left between hobbyist and enterprise, we are looking into that as well. We are always looking to fill in the gaps in our offering.
Re:I'm more worried about... (Score:5, Informative)
Some companies have a large amount of (legally required) testing that goes into the selection and deployment of a new OS. This testing costs a great deal of time and money and so is done infrequently (thus the large number of institutions still running windows 3.1 and HUGE number still running nt4). These types of organizations need a garuntee from the distributor that the software will be supported for enough time to break even on the testing cost or they can't justify using the product. There are many contracts written between businesses and Microsoft garunteeing a product support lifetime and RedHat is wisely working on the same sort of situation to win over some of those businesses.
in a university (Score:3, Interesting)
Advanced Server is too expensive - I work in a university. So I'm left with the choice between upgrading way more often than I'd like or switching to another distribution - too much work to contemplate at the moment, but Debian would be the choice if I did. (Of course if I stop using Red Hat, the Red Hat mirror I run for the university will go away..
Red Hat 7.3, with bugfixes (Score:5, Informative)
*Minimal * Red Hat 7.2, with patches (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Red Hat 7.3, with bugfixes (Score:5, Informative)
Looks like EOL really means EOL. That's why I'm currently looking into Debian for a "long-life" distribution. Never thought I'd do that...
I just found the e-mail from Red Hat:
In accordance with our errata support policy the Red Hat Linux 6.2 and Red
Hat Linux 7 distributions have now reached their end-of-life for errata
maintenance. This means that we will no longer be producing security,
bugfix, or enhancement updates for these products.
Re:Red Hat 7.3, with bugfixes (Score:3, Insightful)
You should be compiling stuff like Apache from source anyway, so that's no problem. But if it's a big monster system-critical package like glibc, you'll have to get the SRPM, patch it yourself, and build another RPM. It can be done, but it might take a few hours of work when all is said and done.
Of course, unofficial support might continue, by community members releasing fixed SRPMs. But do you want to count on that?
Re:Red Hat 7.3, with bugfixes (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Red Hat 7.3, with bugfixes (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a bit scary, but I've found the rpm 4.1.1 backport of 4.2 [rpm.org] to be much more stable than the current version shipped with RH8 (and presumably RH9). It's now one of my standard upgrades.
--
What My Organization Did: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What My Organization Did: (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:What My Organization Did: (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree with this sentiment mostly, you have to realize that to the people that are paid to make these decisions (The Boss, the CIO, whatever) customizable == bad, at least as far as operating system decisions are concerned.
It's impossible to know if you'll always have the expertise to maintain all your wonderful customizations and since, if the operating system can't be made to work, everything fails, it's extremely important that your os configuration be very transparent.
Of course there are sacrifices in power, flexibility and so forth that you make when you choose this route, but to the CIO, ease of maintanence (not to mention replacability of maintenance staff) tends to trump those considerations.
Redhat realizes this and I think this is the source of their success.
Re:What My Organization Did: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hear, Hear!!
I've had the experience of having someone else's highly customized creations dumped in my managerial lap after the customizer bolted for greener pastures. We had to bring in someone on contract to rebuild from scratch.
Running the sl
Re:What My Organization Did: (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess you were sleeping when you wrote that comment tho, so I won't hold it against you...
benefits (Score:3, Informative)
Re:benefits Odd. (Score:4, Interesting)
Of you have the talent in house and do not need support then I would suggest Gentoo? Or maybe SuSE if you want commercial support.
Re:benefits Odd. (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would they charge more for SMP and Memory > 4 Gig? I could have sworn that SMP was available in the standard kernel and that the Memory > 4 was just a patch.
Why? Four reasons:
1. If you can't figure out how to patch and recompile a kernel, you pay up.
2. If you can, but your boss wants "Supported 24x7" written all over the OS of choice, you pay up.
3. If neither of the above apply, but you have some spare cash, and just feel like helping RedHat out, you can pay too...
There is nothing wrong with that that. In fact, I like that model. If you are (1) you pay the "stupidity tax"; in (2) you pay the "corporate assurance tax"; in (3) you are essentially doing a charity contribution (albeit, not tax-deductable). I find myself in any of the three categories once in a while. However, Redhat just came out with a new one -
4. If you can't use Redhat9 because it's such a major pain-in-the-butt, you pay up for a decent distro (advanced server).
<rant>
It took me a couple days just to recompile all the things necessary because of the stupid Kerberos location (everything in
</rant>
It's not fun... Even if have the tools and the expertise in-house, it's just too painful to deal with. The time it took me to build a redhat9-based server multiplied by the $/hour my labor is worth probably was more expensive than buying an "Advanced Server" in the first place. (but on the other hand I am reading
Re:benefits (Score:5, Insightful)
You can get both from standard source on kernel.org as well. I think what the original poster is *really* asking is "What features exist in RH AS 2.1 that are truly unique and worth the money, as opposed to stuff any good linux hacker could've thrown together on his own?". Redhat would do well to answer this.
Re:benefits (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:benefits (Score:5, Interesting)
Piffle. My $79.95 SuSE Pro 8.1 supports at least 2 CPUs and 64 GB memory out of the box.
$cat
Linux version 2.4.19-64GB-SMP (root@SMP_X86.suse.de) (gcc version 3.2) #1 SMP Fri Sep 13 13:15:53 UTC 2002
Not that I have 64 GB of memory installed, but I am running dual CPUs.
Re:benefits (Score:3, Insightful)
cow manure!
Obviously you've never seen/used/pushed-to-the-limit a RH AS 2.1 in a big machine (many CPs, several GBs RAM, external storage, cluster environments). And, my guess, is that you've never gotten into serious Windows serve
IMHO, you answered your own question (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:IMHO, you answered your own question (Score:2)
Re:IMHO, you answered your own question (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't have a reason, then maybe you should rethink your reasoning for RH in the first place (I run RH9 at home, so I'm not anti-RH) and then go from there.
My suspicion is that you're better off with one of the server versions because they do offer support. Sure, you can go without, but at that point I see little advantage of paying the additional money for RH in the first place.
Re:IMHO, you answered your own question (Score:5, Insightful)
* Do you want to recompile each package every time you want to update it, or do you want to do rpm -i?
* Do you want to backport source patches to your current version, and then install it, or do you want to do rpm -i?
* Do you want to have to watch every mailing list for possible security problems on your software, or do you just want to look in the errata section of the RedHat web site?
I think there's essentially five options:
* Continually reinstall your servers to the latest RedHat
* Buy Advanced Server
* Form a community group dedicated to keeping up with older versions of RH - making the above changes as a group
* Use a distro that already has a community group (i.e. - Debian)
* Do it all yourself
Or you could just leave your machine unpatched
Re:IMHO, you answered your own question (Score:3, Insightful)
I hate to be the one to tell you this, but lots of open source programs have both RPMs and SRPMs available from their website. No need to wait on RedHat, and you can still use RPM.
* Do you want to backport source patches to your current version, and then install it, or do you want to do rpm -i?
This statement is just untrue. I ran RedHat 7.2 long after everyone else went to 7.3 and then to 8.0. The
Neither (Score:4, Funny)
-- SCO Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
Re:Neither (Score:4, Funny)
OK, who let loose the debian zealot? What the.. SCO? Who are they? Am I missing something?
Which Red Hat Should Be Worn in the Enterprise? (Score:2)
I think its more about RPMs and patches (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I think its more about RPMs and patches (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would you compile the source on every server?
Seriously, this topic is pretty lame. The poster answers his own question, and the whole EOL issue is really a non-issue in open source.
Who cares if a particular piece of software is no longer supported by a particular distro? You can get either an updated version from the authors, or a precompiled version from another distro.
You can also use tools like rpm2tg [rutgers.edu]
Which version? (Score:2)
Here you go
go with RH 9 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:go with RH 9 (Score:3, Insightful)
Another tip for keeping your RPM database in good shape: don't ever use --force or --nodeps. If you do, you might as well go ahead and reinstall from scratch, it will come back
Re:go with RH 9 (Score:3, Informative)
python
gnome-python2-gtkhtml2
gnome-pyth o n2-canvas
gnome-python2
gnome-python2-bonobo
py thon-optik
rpm-python
libxml2-python
I've you been playing around with --force or --nodeps you might have several conflicting python versions installed. Do a "rpm -qa|grep python", remove the python packages with for example "rpm -e python-2.2.2-26". The version number is given as to remove conflicting packages with the same name. Then install the RPMs mentioned above.
Why bother at all? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why bother at all? (Score:2)
not only do you get customer support, you know that OS your getting isn't infected with anything nasty, I try not to download from mirrors. I understand there is the md5sum and all, but its still nice to know that there is 0 percent chance of any bad data.
What about a source based? (Score:2, Informative)
Are you writing custom applications? (Score:5, Insightful)
Food for thought.
And if you don't need Red Hat's service plan... why not just run Debian -> Stable?
DEBIAN (was: Are you writing custom applications?) (Score:5, Insightful)
It is hard to beat having security patches backported for keeping a system stable. (The other main reason I switched to Debian is that its the only distro that will install run on all the different hardware I use like PA-RISC, Alpha, Sparc{32,64}, and MIPS without jumping through any hoops).
Before anyone jumps on me with a "this other distro is even better", let me clarify that I'm posting this only to say that I think there's a better option than RedHat. In particular, other great distros like Slack and Gentoo that don't have binary package management systems (for better or worse) aren't really comparable to RedHat. Mandrake, from the few days I've used it, just seemed like a flashier and even more bloated version of RedHat.
The only downside I've found to using Debian over RedHat (or the other distros that are based on RedHat) is that some commercial apps are geared towards RedHat and only release RPMs. In particular, Compaq's Linux support software/drivers are almost exclusively in RPM format. Now 'alien' does indeed convert them to installable
And yes, it is much easier to use 'apt-get' than dealing with the RHN to get 'up2date' working.
Debian (Score:4, Insightful)
Stability (Score:2, Informative)
Security Patches (Score:5, Interesting)
There's also application support to consider; the "hobbyist" version of RHL breaks binary compatibility ever other version these days, it seems. Depending on how much non-Free software you want to install, this could be a problem.
Finally, the hobbyist RHL releases tend to have lots of instabilities. There are at least several glaringly obvious major problems in every release. I haven't used an Enterprise RHL, so I can't attest that they are any better; you may find with some experimentation tho that the Enterprise RHL releases are more stable and polished, and wont take as much of your experts' time in fixing dumb distro errors.
Re:Security Patches (Score:3, Informative)
IMHO, relative to RH8:
Setting the locale to en_GB.UTF-8 or whatever (instead of en_GTB), thus breaking Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Shipping versions of RPM older than 4.1.1
Shipping Mozilla 1.0.1 and galeon 1.2.6 as the latest errata
Not providing an update to XFree 4.3, which seems critical for hardware-assisted GL to work well with ATI Radeon cards
Not including ALSA, despite being required for lo
same situation here... (Score:3, Insightful)
Our solution?
All machines now run FreeBSD and are kept up to date with CVSup. No more corporate BS. The saved $60/yr/machine covers the cost of an admin running "make buildworld" every now and then.
Once you get BSD set up just right with your make.conf and stuff like that, it's so easy to keep up to date.
I'd recommend this (or one of the Linux distros that use similar tech like Gentoo or Debian). Red Hat has made life difficult for anybody between "hobbyist" and "enterprise"
Buy the Enterprise one... (Score:2, Insightful)
What you need (Score:2)
Upgrade every year? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Enterprise" servers are one's that just work and you don't have to mess with them. That is contrary to what most sysadmins like to do with systems - that is, mess with them constantly.
Versions (Score:5, Interesting)
Furthermore...do you ever hear of large companies buying commercial Unixes (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) without support contracts? Do they ever say, "we have lots of people who know unix...why do we need support?" It's the exact same thing. When it comes to support, it really doesn't matter if it's Open Source or not. It's still a big complex product which can't be allowed to break.
The advantage of Open Source comes in when you want a customized version of Red Hat deployed. You can rewrite and recompile the kernel and all applications to suit your needs. In that case, I doubt any external support organization would be able to help you.
Hardware compatibility (Score:2)
It's really a matter of hardware and longer development cycles. For instance, it's hard to get HP FC HBA drivers for RH8/9, but drivers for RH AS 2.1 are available. This is true for a number of HBA vendors. The same can be said for other vendor provided drivers. They don't want to release binary-only modules for 15 revs of the kernel if they don't have to.
The other side is the longer release cycle. A server doesn't need everything and the kitchen sync, but relies upon the viability of the core application
Consider long term planning (Score:2, Insightful)
In 5 years... (Score:5, Insightful)
To some, the extra money is well worth the insurance you get.
For what it's worth (Score:5, Insightful)
But you need to evaluate your own needs obviously.
Re:For what it's worth (Score:3, Insightful)
It depends (Score:5, Insightful)
First remember to think in terms of the company. While you and your fellow admins might be uber-gurus you might not be with the company forever. Will they find other slashdot reading uber-gurus to replace you, or will they be left with less capable people?
Then consider what you do on your own. Do you install RPMs from RedHat, or do you "use the source"? Do you update your own kernel? What do you do if there's a security flaw or bug in a software package? Do you use the source or the RPM.
RedHat offers an attractive model for companies who don't want to depend on having "Bob the admin" around and would rather depend on the idea that "RedHat" will be around (the former usually isn't there as long as is around.)
Everyone company has a different culture and answer, those are some of the questions to consider.
Re:It depends (Score:3, Insightful)
Do you think that's unethical? Show me a company that values its employees more than its o
Support for Oracle... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Support for Oracle... (Score:3, Insightful)
Benefits (there are some) (Score:2, Informative)
If you ever want to run an Itanium2 with Linux you'll need Redhat Advanced Server. And cough up the dough too. For both the machine and the software license. Intel did a deal with Redhat to give first shot at itanium2's for porting. And with an Itanium2 there is a lot of porting to be done.
I'd personaly go with an opteron myself. You dont need to reorganize your software for the architecture so it will run efficiently. Also you are not tied to Intels linux compilers which are pretty poor quality for the i
Why RedHat? (Score:2)
If you want an "enterprise" distribution, well, I suppose that you want to run there certified software (like i.e. Oracle), and then you should see for what distributions that software is certified to choose from (for the Oracle example, probably will be RedHat Advanced Server and United Linux in general).
If you don't meant to run certified software, and have knowledgable people there, well, probably most properly maintained dist
It's not entirely a sales tactic. (Score:5, Insightful)
Beyond that, a lot of experienced tech executives, having been burned by a lack of support in the past, are not going to chance it without a service contract like the one Enterprise offers.
The arguments for and against are like the arguments for and against buying insurance, because the support contract is a form of insurance. You will never convince me that the full coverage I pay for on my vehicle isn't worth it, because at the moment my car was stolen and totalled, I received more money back than I'd ever paid the insurance company. On the other hand, you'll never convince my girlfriend -- who drives an '83 Accord -- that anything other than the minimum liability insurance the law requires is necessary.
We're both right, because our situations are different.
Discussed on beowulf list (Score:5, Informative)
Stable Software *is* worth money. (Score:3, Insightful)
This difference is especially apparent with Linux distributions. A distribution intended for desktop use will, by nessisity, include unstable software and libraries so as to allow constantly-unstable software like media players to work. On the other hand, a server distribution will run tested, stable versions of everything.
If Red Hat is actually claiming 5 year product lifetimes for their server products then it's probably worth getting them. That will allow you to not do a reinstall until your application needs a OS upgrade - instead of needing to reinstall because Red Hat no longer supports the old version.
Which do we use? (Score:3, Interesting)
GRRRRRRRR..... (Score:5, Funny)
As one who works somewhere where the pointy haired idiots don't even want to hear the word Linux, I would kill to have your problems.
Quit whining and pick one you lucky little bastard.
Re:GRRRRRRRR..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Not only do we run Redhat servers here, but my employer sent me away for redhat-run classes, I got to crash at the Mariott across the street even though the training site was only 30 miles away, ate steak dinner nightly, and got my RHCE, all at no charge to moi! :)
There's more to it than just Red Hat's support... (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a management question (Score:5, Insightful)
What makes your boss feel more secure? Is your boss the kind to totally trust you and your judgement, or do they like to see some 'backup'?
Also, would you like to be totally on your own, or would you like to be able to say "Know what? I'm sick of this problem!" and call up Red Hat support? This could be helpful in shifting blame away from yourself.
Straight from the source (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm in the same situation as the article poster. I'm running 6.2 up to AS as well, and am somewhat confused as to what I will do with my workstation users. There's little to no economic incentive to prefer Enterprise WS over WXP. RH 7.3 and 8.0 lose support at the end of this year, and I'm not sure that 9's support will last much beyond that. It seems that the "comsumer" grade products will have only about a year of support. And, with no "apt-get dist-upgrade" equivalent, I'd have to visit these boxes personally to perform upgrades. In some cases, that's impossible for me to do, as they're embedded all over the country in remote-sensing applications.
Re:Straight from the source (Score:5, Interesting)
A client-side monopoly coupled with incompatible and proprietary formats and protocols is the main reason Microsoft has any penetration in the server market.
There are always two sides to client-server, and ignoring the client means potential customers can be expected to say things like "but Samba doesn't support Windows XP Professional Edition SP2 file sharing" or "this Outlook 2006 thingy no longer supports IMAP in favor of undocumented protocol XYZ".
Companies like Red Hat, Apple, IBM, and Sun won't be able to stop bitching about Microsoft until they get MS' desktop market share under 50%. Without a "controlling stake", Microsoft just might be forced to play fairly, for once. Until then, Microsoft will remain the 200lb bully kicking sand into Red Hat's 98lb face.
Fortunately, even big guys like Sun are developing desktops based on Linux for corporate users, and companies like Lindows are targeting home users. Let's hope they are successful.
Which to choose (Score:4, Informative)
The question is support and patches.. (Score:3, Interesting)
We are planning on upgrading to RH 9, but patch/fix support for that is only scheduled at a year! Where do we go from here? Yearly upgrades? There goes our stability model.
I was told that RH's "Enterprise" workstation product only comes with an additional year of security fixes and support, coming in at 2 years. We really need something on the order of 3-5 years.. Does anyone have any suggestions?
-molo
A few ways of looking at it (Score:4, Insightful)
If you are running commercial apps on the server, then have a look at what they officially support. We have two Websphere 5 servers and IBM supports Red Hat 7.3 and Suse 8.1 Pro (I may be wrong on that Suse version) on the server and Red Hat 8 for a development system. In this case, we also want support from IBM, so using AS makes sense even though Websphere works fine on Red Hat 9, Debian, etc.
The answer is really just a combination of what you're looking for. For a team of Linux experts who will update their own software, Red Hat is merely an installer. If you're going to update with RHN, then a long product lifecycle is important to keep your system secure.
Re:A few ways of looking at it (Score:4, Informative)
Here's a way to look at it: (Score:5, Informative)
It's about support (Score:4, Insightful)
SuSE (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to be OT, but is Red Hat necessary? (Score:3, Informative)
I've never been a big fan of Red Hat. We replaced our Red Hat 6.2/7.0/7.1 servers here with Debian (some stable, some testing) and haven't looked back. There's something so comforting about never having to worry about versions and upgrades -- it's as if we've got infinite support.
Plus, I've found IRC people (what I refer to as "REAL tech support") most helpful on debian-related channels. How many times have you called up Red Hat because you needed support? Google and mailing lists are probably a more effective method anyway.
If you know your Linux, Debian is probably what you want. If not, there are several options besides Red Hat. Don't be afraid just because the name is different!
Advanced Server (Score:5, Informative)
You have to consider 2 things...
1. RedHat 9 is only going to have 1 year of errata published for it.
2. RedHat Advanced Server is going to be the target for a lot of Enterprise application vendors.
For #1 - what are you going to do for errata after 1 year? Upgrade to RedHat 10? Find another source of binary patches, or hope that some other commercial entity decided to build them? Build them yourself? You need to figure this out
For #2 - many application vendors like Oracle are aiming at RHAS, simply because the "commercial" 8/9/10... distros are a target that moves too quickly. I assume that others (Veritas, etc.) are in the same boat.
My organization is small enough that people running Linux on their desktops take care of themselves and the Linux servers are few enough to be upgraded as needed. However, if your orgzanization is larger you need to consider what RHAS provides. I'd be interested in what people who have larger RH deployments are doing...
Re:Advanced Server (Score:3, Interesting)
In hacker terms Red Hat Enterprise products are "boring". For some markets this has a huge appeal, for others it doesn't.
Do I really need a license? (Score:3, Interesting)
my question is then why chose red hat at all? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think red hat's strategy in having "consumer" and "commercial" versions is pretty much what you stated that they rh salesman stated. "consumer" versions can have the latest and greatest, while the "commercial" versions can be slightly older, but stable, production proven versions. In any evolving software, the more time you can let people bang on software, the more stable it will prove to be. Also, more companies will target those stable versions than they will the bleeding edge stuff, unless they are forced to through a new kernel feature.
Uhh, Redhat? Are you insane!??!! (Score:3, Funny)
they're right (Score:5, Interesting)
The Red Hat Advanced Server is indeed the best choice for the enterprise. The consumer-grade Red Hat is interesting indeed, has nice features, but sometimes is just a bit too much into the cutting edge.
I've run several times into issues with various pieces of software when running them on the consumer grade Red Hat. No, it wasn't because "Red Hat is buggy"
If you're a small company and want to use the consumer grade Red Hat because it's cheaper, there are some tricks you can play. One of them and probably the most important, is to not start using it as soon as it gets out. Wait for a few months, i'll say at least three, then deploy it. This way, the most obvious bugs will get squashed out. Once i even deployed RH8.0 instead of RH9, because at the time SpamAssassin was not happy at all when running on 9.
Now, Red Hat choose to shorten the support for older versions of their consumer grade distribution, therefore making it more difficult to apply my advice. So, use your best judgement.
Overall, i'll say Red Hat has a three-layered approach to stability:
1. They have the so-called the Rawhide distribution, which is their perpetual beta, from which a new consumer grade distribution emerges every 6 months.
2. The consumer grade distribution, from which RH Advanced Server emerges every 2 years or something like that.
3. Red Hat Advanced Server.
IMO, the consumer grade distribution is a beta for RHAS, only they don't call it that way.
why not mandrake? (Score:3, Interesting)
ENTERPRISE means conservatism! (Score:4, Informative)
Well I'll try to set you straight without being patronising or snide about it.
In an enterprise environment, a business is run on stability and predictability. Red Hat is free, which is fine, but how much money will your company pay to make sure that someone is there to take responsibility for but fixes over the next five years? I'll give you a hint--if you're a private, profit-making company and YOU are expected to fix the OS after a year, then get out now--you'll be living in hell for another year until your company goes under.
As cliche'd as it is, companies buy solutions. I don't want to buy Red Hat v8 or 9 or SUSE whatever, or slackware or Windows XP or Solaris--I want to buy a system that does the job I give to it, and I want a vendor to back it for at least half a decade.
If you're a professional company, don't even consider trying to 'do it yourself' with hobbiest level software. Get a conservative, supported package; and work with the vendor as much as possible. Don't waste time and money trying to go it alone.
Which RH do *WE* use? (Score:5, Interesting)
We switched from RedHat to SuSE [suse.com] several years ago.
Our reasons for making the transition were:
- SuSE's stable enterprise/server editions are far less expensive than RedHat's
- DB2 UDB and Oracle are both Certified for SuSE enterprise server editions
- More specialised sub-distros available if you don't feel like twiddling
and paring down the full distro yourself.
- I supported RH from 1997-1999 (IRIX, SunOS, Solaris, BSD 4.2 and 4.3 before that)
My opinion is that the support database for SuSE is better than RH,
and that SuSE's support is much, much better -- and not nearly as often required --
compared to SGI's or Sun Microsystems.
- When we made the transition from RH to SuSE, SuSE was streets ahead of RH in security.
While not entirely up-to-date,
Marc Heuse's
article [suse.com] is a succinct and readable yet technically comprehensive introduction.
Areas in which RH and SuSE are roughly equal are:As we're primarily an AS/400 development shop, with Linux just providing part of the infrastructure, it's been fortuitous that our choice, SuSE, has turned out to be the most stable distro for the AS/400 and PPC platforms.
We dealt with no salesperson in either case. Just bought the disks and support packages we felt we needed, and based our judgement entirely on what versions of what were already available on the latest release. Possibly because the RH and SuSE distro cycles were out-of-synch with each other, the latest SuSE had the more recent patch levels when we made the transition. But every time I've checked, this seems to be the case.
Slashdot ignorance (Score:4, Insightful)
The Red Hat Advanced Server product is just what we want. It is stable, well tested and has a long support life. The cost goes towards an annual support contract which removes the fear that Linux has no backup when there's problems. Knowing that pay for, commercial software (such as Oracle) and specific hardware models are certified for this platform makes life very easy. You need to think how some of our customers who are used to Sun or Microsoft feel about using a "toy" operating system. To them, the financial costs are not the issue, having a mature, stable and supported platform on which to run their applications is all that counts.
We've standardised on Red Hat Advanced Server ES for our Linux customers, but we're still using 8.0 internally. We have enough UNIX experience to manage our own boxes, but for customers, Advanced Server is perfect.
Red Hat may not be the most hardcore distribution, but it is the most respected in the business world. That's why we are happy to use and recommend it.
How married are you to Red Hat? (Score:4, Interesting)
****
I'm an RHCE (not an especially tough cert, btw, but someone who passes it is at least competent), but I don't overwhelmingly like their distro as a server. I should point out, however, that I have not run their Advanced Server, so I am unsure how valid my opinion is there. I have run quite a lot of RH boxes over the years; I stopped using their system around 7.0.
I'm presently running a network of about 80 machines. Most of them are Debian, and are incredibly easy to manage remotely. We have a few remaining old RH boxes, and they're very difficult to deal with in comparison -- hard to administer, hard to patch, just a royal PITA.
The support-contract option with RH can be a nice thing to have, but you say you have a lot of inhouse talent already, and Debian is very, very good as a server. I think it makes a rotten desktop client (personally I like Mandrake for that), but Debian stable is *extremely* stable, and Debian testing is just fine for most production servers. If you happen to want to run it as a desktop, you can use unstable for that, which is the bleeding-edge stuff that may break horribly.
Debian's entire emphasis is on two things: stability, and being managed remotely. They do not casually break things; by the time it gets even to 'testing' it's usually very solid. Their distributed community is really, really good. It's a great example of just how good truly free software can be.
It does, of course, have problems. My biggest gripe is probably that installation is always a new adventure. The installer is old, text-based, and not updated frequently. Getting it running on newer hardware can be a real pain, and once you have it running, you can run into weird dependency problems sometimes. (for awhile, as an example, when I did a base install, updated the source lines from 'stable' to 'testing', and then tried to install a recent kernel image, the install failed with a requirement for 'dash', but I couldn't install either dash or ash because both required ash! My solution was to drop back to stable, install ash [which had no dependency], and then switch back to testing. ) That particular problem may be gone, but every time I install a new batch of servers I run into a whole new batch of problems, be it unsupported hardware or what have you. I have never had a problem *once I have the server running*, but getting it up and stable in the first place is probably Debian's weakest point. RH has their wonderful Kickstart system, which is just lightyears better, one of the things I really, really like about their distro.
The cost in switching from RH to Debian is probably not trivial. It took me probably six months to learn, and I'm still picking up new tricks and tips. But I believe you will see an excellent ROI, as it's amazingly easy to script updates across vast numbers of machines very quickly. It's just a cleaner design, and it's easier to work with remotely. You don't really have to worry about intentional obsolescence.... there are people out there who, with great care, have been running their Debian servers for 5+ years without reinstalling. The Debian teams react very, very quickly to security issues. And it's both free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer.
RH, on the other hand, offers much better installation, and they have a custom version of the kernel that many people swear by. It's the best-supported of the Linux distros, and if you have a substantial investment in scripts and the RPM format, or if you need commercial application support (eg, Oracle) it's probably not worth switching. And it's easier to find people qualified in RH.
So what's best? Purely up to you. I can tell you that I'm extremely happy with a combo of Debian and Mandrake.
Are you clustering? Running Oracle? Both? (Score:3, Interesting)
The main reason to move onto Red Hat Enterprise Linux is for Oracle support, as you simply won't get any under 7.x-9. If you're not dealing with ever calling up for support for either Oracle or RedHat itself, then why bother paying so much for Linux?
However, the higher-ups won't be happy about giving up an external support resource. The only way around this is documentation, and lots of it. Relying on debian packages? Running a custom apt repository? Document your policies and stick to them. Don't just install some random Linux, make an in-house distro, and with it, the documentation needed to upgrade it. This isn't a toy for a teenager and his Pentium box, it's a corporate-grade Linux distro. No downtime, no compromises. They'll want you to be able to train staff quickly, and in the end, you *are* replaceable. Don't make it too hard on yourself.
some words from a RHCE (Score:3, Interesting)
Then came the Advanced Server thingie. I've had more problems with it than with any RedHat before, even had to fix kernel bugs to get my hardware to work properly. RedHat was aware of this particular probelm, but even with paid support, we only got 'fix in the nex errata' reply. So much for a support.
It does not matter if you have rh AS, 7.3, debian, *bsd