Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat
Eatherly, John D [EQ] wrote: We are looking at Red Hat and SUSE. Does anyone have any input on which one is better for the z platform. Any advantages or disadvantages? The only difference that I can see is that SUSE seems to be a little ahead on the maintenance releases. I have done some searching but cannot find much more that would help us make this decision. Any input on this would be appreciated. Hi John, I have worked with both RHEL 5.0 and SLES10-SP1. I must admit that my previous experience was mostly SuSE (many years PC and z). For me I found SuSE much easier to install, customize, and to maintain. But if I had worked with Redhat for years my preferences may have been totally reversed ;-) Both products are excellent, but although its all GNU/Linux underneath the supporting installation and administration scripts the distros use are totally different. If you are new to Linux, then the choice really is yours, if you have some expertize in either one I would recommend that you stick with that one. Also mixing the two (as we do) is an administration headache, better to pick one distro and stick with it. Example Firewall - both distros provide tools, both different, even though iptables is running underneath it all. And the exmaple list could go on and on ;-) Another point is what will your main application/solution be? Checking support for that may be more important than the base distro itself. Mark -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat
We use SuSE on the z. The original reason was the support for our environment. Last week at the IBM Expo, two presenters from IBM said that they had given code to SuSE and Red Hat that only SuSE had included in their distributions. Our two 32 bit Red Hat HPC clusters are Red Hat today but the vendor is switching to SuSE for the new 64 bit clusters. Lea Stahr Linux, zLinux, and zVM Administrator 630-753-5445 [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Eatherly, John D [EQ] Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 8:49 PM To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Novell Suse vs Red Hat We are looking at Red Hat and SUSE. Does anyone have any input on which one is better for the z platform. Any advantages or disadvantages? The only difference that I can see is that SUSE seems to be a little ahead on the maintenance releases. I have done some searching but cannot find much more that would help us make this decision. Any input on this would be appreciated. Thanks in advance... John Eatherly -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This e-mail, and any attachments and/or documents linked to this email, are intended for the addressee and may contain information that is privileged, confidential, proprietary, or otherwise protected by law. Any dissemination, distribution, or copying is prohibited. This notice serves as a confidentiality marking for the purpose of any confidentiality or nondisclosure agreement. If you have received this communication in error, please contact the original sender. -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 6:47 AM, in message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Evans, Kevin R [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -snip- I do notice though, that there are many more SUSE questions raised (and answered) here than RHEL. It's not obvious to me why that is. Is it because: SUSE is used more than RHEL? Because SUSE has more problems (don't think this is so). Largely because Novell/SUSE has about 80-90% of the mainframe market. A good part of that is because SUSE (at that time SuSE) got their SuSE 7.0 mainframe version out first, and then followed up with SLES7, and much later, SLES8. During that same time, Red Hat put out a 31-bit Red Hat Linux 7.2, and then a 64-bit Red Hat Linux 7.1 (which a lot of people thought was curious), but no follow-up release (it seemed). When people on the various mailing lists asked if Red Hat was going to stay in the mainframe market, no answer was forthcoming, because the technical folks that hung out in the various mailing lists weren't allowed to answer such questions. Some time after that, Red Hat produced Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which included a mainframe version. By that time, most people had chosen SLES. Redbooks had been written, using SLES. ISVs had done their certifications for SLES, etc., etc. So, in short, largely historical reasons. Mark Post -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat
Makes sense to me, thanks Mark (as usual). Kevin -Original Message- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mark Post Sent: Tuesday, September 25, 2007 9:34 AM To: LINUX-390@VM.MARIST.EDU Subject: Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 6:47 AM, in message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Evans, Kevin R [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -snip- I do notice though, that there are many more SUSE questions raised (and answered) here than RHEL. It's not obvious to me why that is. Is it because: SUSE is used more than RHEL? Because SUSE has more problems (don't think this is so). Largely because Novell/SUSE has about 80-90% of the mainframe market. A good part of that is because SUSE (at that time SuSE) got their SuSE 7.0 mainframe version out first, and then followed up with SLES7, and much later, SLES8. During that same time, Red Hat put out a 31-bit Red Hat Linux 7.2, and then a 64-bit Red Hat Linux 7.1 (which a lot of people thought was curious), but no follow-up release (it seemed). When people on the various mailing lists asked if Red Hat was going to stay in the mainframe market, no answer was forthcoming, because the technical folks that hung out in the various mailing lists weren't allowed to answer such questions. Some time after that, Red Hat produced Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which included a mainframe version. By that time, most people had chosen SLES. Redbooks had been written, using SLES. ISVs had done their certifications for SLES, etc., etc. So, in short, largely historical reasons. Mark Post -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat
We chose SuSE originally based on license/maintenance costs. (Our management demands contracted support.) We later switched to RedHat since Oracle supports running on RedHat but not on SuSE. Since we only want to support one distro, we went with RedHat. Tom Shilson Powered by Penguins Unix Team / IT Server Services Tel: 651-733-7591 tshilson at mmm dot com Fax: 651-736-7689 -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat
On Mon, Sep 24, 2007 at 9:49 PM, in message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Eatherly, John D [EQ] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We are looking at Red Hat and SUSE. Does anyone have any input on which one is better for the z platform. Any advantages or disadvantages? The only difference that I can see is that SUSE seems to be a little ahead on the maintenance releases. I have done some searching but cannot find much more that would help us make this decision. Any input on this would be appreciated. I've tried to figure out how to answer this without being dismissed as of course he says that, he works for Novell. I guess I would point you to a z/Journal article I wrote about a year ago, while still working at EDS: Selecting a Linux or Linux/390 Distribution : http://www.zjournal.com/index.cfm?section=articleaid=604 If you would like some of the background to that, contact me off list. I'm not quite sure what you mean by a little ahead on the maintenance releases. Both SLES and RHEL put out fixes on a as-needed basis, and both put out major updates/service packs on a fairly regular schedule. Mark Post -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 9:42 AM, in message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Tom Shilson [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We chose SuSE originally based on license/maintenance costs. (Our management demands contracted support.) We later switched to RedHat since Oracle supports running on RedHat but not on SuSE. Since we only want to support one distro, we went with RedHat. Excuse me? Oracle is certified to run on SLES, and was certified before Red Hat. Recently, Oracles sales people have been pushing their CentOS clone (Unbreakable Linux) on Intel so that they can try to poach customers from Red Hat. Or failing that, they're pointing them to Red Hat in hopes they can convince them later on to switch. This has nothing to do with what is supported or certified. http://www.oracle.com/technology/support/metalink/index.html (You have to click your way through far too many levels, but start with View Certifications by Platform and then IBM Linux on System z (31 and 64 bit). Mark Post -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat
On Tue, Sep 25, 2007 at 7:48 AM, in message [EMAIL PROTECTED], Stahr, Lea [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We use SuSE on the z. The original reason was the support for our environment. Last week at the IBM Expo, two presenters from IBM said that they had given code to SuSE and Red Hat that only SuSE had included in their distributions. Our two 32 bit Red Hat HPC clusters are Red Hat today but the vendor is switching to SuSE for the new 64 bit clusters. This is one area (among man) where the two distributions approach things differently. Early on, the SuSE (now Novell) developers worked very closely with the IBM developers to include as many of the IBM mainframe-specific patches as possible. Given the bleeding edge nature of some of the stuff, there were some problems. Now, Novell does an assessment of patches to determine how intrusive they are, and how likely they are to affect stability, versus the additional functionality provided. As a result, Novell still includes a lot of the updates in the regular maintenance stream, others on Service Pack updates, and others in new releases (SLES10, versus SLES11, etc.) Red Hat has made the business decision that they won't incorporate any IBM patches that have not been accepted into the official kernel source tree. Once a patch has been merged, they will consider backporting it to the version(s) they ship. In the case of the 2.4 kernels, this made a huge difference, because the 2.4 kernel maintainer wasn't of a mind to accept many of IBM's patches. This has changed radically with the 2.6 kernels. There are very few IBM patches that get rejected or deferred. As a result, the Red Hat 2.6 kernels and the Novell 2.6 kernels have almost exactly the same IBM patches in it. So, RHEL5 and SLES10, from a _kernel only_ perspective, are very similar in functionality. Not identical, but very similar. (For example, with SLES10 SP1, Novell picked up all the outstanding IBM patches except for the NSS one, which will likely be in SP2.) Mark Post -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Novell Suse vs Red Hat
We are looking at Red Hat and SUSE. Does anyone have any input on which one is better for the z platform. Any advantages or disadvantages? The only difference that I can see is that SUSE seems to be a little ahead on the maintenance releases. I have done some searching but cannot find much more that would help us make this decision. Any input on this would be appreciated. Thanks in advance... John Eatherly -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat
I have tried both and have decided that the best way to choose a distribution has nothing to do with their performance on a zSeries. For me, both worked well enough with our web workload, that I would have needed extensive instrumentation (your queue, Barton) to tell the difference. I think there are two other aspects of your installation that will serve as better criteria for picking a distribution. First, look at your expected workload, do you or will you run a particular application that is only or preferentially supported on a particular distribution. This is why we chose SUSE, at the time of our decision, Oracle was supported on SLES 9, so we run SLES 9. If that doesn't give you a clear cut choice, then look to your own staff and see which distribution they are most comfortable with. If we needed to revisit our choice of distribution, we might go with RedHat because we have lots of ad-hoc RedHat (fedora) machines around the network, or OpenSolaris (?) since the nearest help I can get are the Sun/Solaris support staff. /Tom Kern /301-903-2211 Eatherly, John D [EQ] wrote: We are looking at Red Hat and SUSE. Does anyone have any input on which one is better for the z platform. Any advantages or disadvantages? The only difference that I can see is that SUSE seems to be a little ahead on the maintenance releases. I have done some searching but cannot find much more that would help us make this decision. Any input on this would be appreciated. Thanks in advance... John Eatherly -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
Re: Novell Suse vs Red Hat
Eatherly, John D [EQ] wrote: We are looking at Red Hat and SUSE. Does anyone have any input on which one is better for the z platform. Any advantages or disadvantages? The only difference that I can see is that SUSE seems to be a little ahead on the maintenance releases. I have done some searching but cannot find much more that would help us make this decision. Any input on this would be appreciated. Thanks in advance... John Eatherly If Thomas' advice doesn't help, then get evaluation versions of each and try them for yourself. You could even try Debian: Debian doesn't provide professional support, but that doesn't mean nobody does. In my experience (peecees) Debian has some rough edges, but it compensates for that with the enormous choice of (FSF) Free software. Almost any free software anyone here can suggest, is part of Debian. The current distro takes not one, nor even two, but three DVDs. And then there's the source. -- Cheers John -- spambait [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] Please do not reply off-list -- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
