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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."
Wearing a Red Shirt while on the enterprise.
Oh wait, nevermind...
Do you Gentoo!?
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.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
We started using FreeBSD. It's stable, doesn't cost a bundle, and isn't dependent on .rpm's. Just my thought.
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Trouble making decisions? Just flip for it.
You should choose neither! There is no Red Hat Advanced Server! They have taken all of their enterprise server capabilities from our product! We have sued the Red Hat Infadels out of existence! You will all be running SCO Unix soon!
-- SCO Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf
My journal has hot
If you really have enough in-house talent to not need Red Hat support why bother with Red Hat on a commercial level at all? Just download one of their ISOs (that is possible, right?) - or any other distribution for that matter - and do it all yourself. Correct me if I'm wrong but the number one reason to actually pay for a Linux distribution is the support that comes with it, isn't it?
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
If you are, you may need support for many years for that OS version 9.x. There can be libraries that your application relies upon, but those older-version libraries might not be present in newer versions of the software that contain exploits you would want to patch, or features you might like to build around.
Food for thought.
And if you don't need Red Hat's service plan... why not just run Debian -> Stable?
The ______ Agenda
The lifetime applies to security patches, which is a good point to consider - are your experts up to keeping usable RPMs ready for any and all security vulnerabilities releases, across a variety of RHL products?
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.
Think about a mission critical system that needs to run 24x7. Every time you have to apply a patch or upgrade the system, that's downtime you can't afford.
"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.
You answered your question yourself. If you don't want long-term Red Hat enterprise support, then go for the consumer releases. If you have enough expertise in-house to support it yourself, then great. Frankly, I would be surprised if any large organization would choose to do such a thing. Relying on hacker-experience in house is dangerous, unless you have a mammoth internal training program. The cost of enterprise-level support is far less than the cost of enterprise-level downtime. And that's not a sales pitch.
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.
I think one thing to keep in mind is what will your tech department look like in 5 years. Shoot, 5 years ago who would have guessed things would be like they are now? Say your staff is halved in 5 years for whatever reason. Will not having official support matter at that time? I'm not trying to advocate buying Advanced Server, but you should at least keep in mind that crazy things can happen over the course of 5 years.
To some, the extra money is well worth the insurance you get.
For what my opinion it worth... We've got about 200 workstations (a decent enough size network) and we've got several RH servers... we standardize on every 3rd release (6.2, 7.2, and now 9) and don't have any problems. We've got redhat network subscriptions for updates and everything is rock solid. I see no need for "enterprise editions." Upgrading the servers every few years before end of life isn't that horrible for us... And there's usually compelling reasons like journaled file systems and new versions of ssh that justify it.
But you need to evaluate your own needs obviously.
It depends on how much you rely on RedHat after you install the product, and how much the company wants to continue to do that.
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.
Darthtuttle
Thought Architect
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.
All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. --Edmund Burke
Not every organization, large or otherwise, has the in-house talent to do their own open-source maintenance and support. Maybe they have most of their machines running Windows, maybe not.
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.
This was recently discussed on the Beowulf list.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
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.
"A microprocessor... is a terrible thing to waste." --
GeneralEmergency
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.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I've been told straight out from the RH sales folks that they really couldn't care less about the "comsumer"/free as in beer version of RH. They don't believe that market penetration at the desktop level for general use is where they need to devote resources, therefore, they're going for the server and high-performance workstation market. Thus, we have the Enterprise AS/ES/WS products, with long-term support and more attention/quality focus. I for one like this idea of 5-year support cycles, but am worried about the increased costs, in particular at the workstation level.
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.
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.
11*43+456^2
2 CPU's & massive amounts of memory for example
/proc/version
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.
-- Alastair
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?
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
I think you answered your own question here. Red Hat, more than likely, does not market the enterprise edition to "good linux hackers". Rather, it's for companies that don't have a large *nix I.T. staff, want to save moeny over traditional unix, but expect the support options of traditional unix.
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
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...
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Yes, the salesman is correct. :-) (isn't that something that almost never happens?) :-) but because, for example, they backported some features from kernel-2.5 into the distribution kernel, thus triggering some weird stuff in the VM on systems with lotsa spawning processes from Perl, or they were early adopters of glibc-2.3, thus breaking some assumption some threading applications were making, etc. All that is fine on my home computer, it's not fine on the servers that pay my bills.
;-)
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.
I thought RedHat was the greatest thing in the world until I tried Debian. I now use Debian 'stable' on servers, 'testing' or 'unstable' on workstations/etc.
.debs for me, but hand tweaking is usually necessary.
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.
We switched from RedHat to SuSE 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 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.
This isn't really a direct answer to your question; it started out as one, but it gradually morphed into "what distro should I use" instead of "what Redhat should I use." At this point it's only tangentially related to the original question, but I'll go ahead and post it anyway. It may not help you specifically, but other people reading it may benefit.
****
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.
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
Jobs? Which jobs?