Paul,
Can I have an opinion even if I have never used Suse in a
production corporate environment ?
I have used RedHat extensively in production environment,
including attached to an EMC Fibre Channel storage array and with
Oracle. I'm pretty happy with it. The AS version stuffs a lot of
stuff you don't need (or want) in to a base installation (ISDN stuff,
Samba related stuff, etc), but WS, ES and AS all have pretty good
hardware support out of the box. The big deal is that everything that
runs on Linux for corporate use, runs on RHEL. We have had some
software vendors say they run on Suse, but they also have a RHEL
product. Nothing we have wanted has come in Suse only packages. That
is the real reason we don't even look elsewhere. All our apps are
RHEL packages and/or certified and supported for RHEL.
The RHN tool is pretty convenient. You can see what packages
and errata apply to each machine in your account, you can even tell
them machines to patch themselves the next time they phone home
(check in with up2date servers). You can see which ones are not
phoning home, etc.
The truth is that we haven't needed support from RedHat
except once when we had a very obscure problem with very large LUNs
on our EMC. We didn't know it was related to the size of the LUN, and
neither did RedHat. We kinda found and resolved that
problem/limitation ourselves. Interesting to note that just built
another system and tried the same large LUNs that caused us a problem
before. This time we used a newer "Update" than before (this time
RHEL AS U3) and were able to use the large LUNs.
In General I am very happy with RHEL. Since we haven't used
support for any of the WS boxes, we are considering buying the
Developer pack for the boxes we use WS on (appliances that we home
grew). The Dev license do not include support, but allow updates from
RHN, and are much cheaper. I am undecided on this. They have been so
trouble free that I am happy to pay RH for the job done well... but
then there is that bottom line. :o) Of course we could use CentOS.
(I have no idea what kind of emoticon to put here).
My thoughts, free for you.
Mike
At 09:00 AM 4/14/2006, you wrote:
I already have an opinion on this, but I always seek input from
other knowledgeable admins on such things.
I'd like opinions, and some reasoning behind them, as to which Linux
distro you think is better for corporate servers. I'm looking at, in
order of importance: reliability, ease of maintenance and upgrading,
support, and cost (we plan to pay for support from whatever Linux
distributor we decide to go with).
Thanks,
PGA
--
Paul G. Allen
Owner, Sr. Engineer, BSIT/SE
Random Logic Consulting Services
www.randomlogic.com
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
--
[email protected]
http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
