Which Red Hat Should Be Worn in the Enterprise?

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."

Comments

Red Hat 7.3, with bugfixes

[bytor4232]

For now, our company has been deploying Red Hat 7.3 with all the latest bugfixes and security releases patched in. However, 7.3 is ending its product life at the end of this year, so we may have to "rethink" our strategy with using Red Hat.

Re:Red Hat 7.3, with bugfixes

[wossName]

Let's see, I still have a couple of machines running Red Hat 6.2, which hit EOL in March. Number of any kind of updates for RH 6.2 since March: 0.

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.

Support for Oracle...

[nyc_paladin]

I know that if you have Oracle in your environment, Red Hat is going to push you to use Advance Server 2.1. Too be honest there is not really that much difference between the two except how they configured the kernel and advance server is specialized for clustering. Which you can do on your own. But if you are looking for support for products like Oracle or any other corporate solutions go with advance server. If you are just using it for email, web server, file server, etc (isn't linux wonderful) then stick with the "consumer version". It's cheaper.

Discussed on beowulf list

[Col. Klink (retired)]

This was recently discussed on the Beowulf list.

Here's a way to look at it:

[fizban]

When someone has a problem with the server, do you want them calling you when you're on vacation, relaxing at home on the weekend, sleeping, etc., or would you rather have them call Red Hat support?

Advanced Server

[irix]

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:I'm more worried about...

[jeremy_hogan]

So for the canned answer go to:
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...

[malfunct]

For those that don't understand why a 5 to 7 year product cycle is important here is a small summary:

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.