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Which Red Hat Should Be Worn in the Enterprise?

Posted by Cliff on from the for-those-who-like-to-wear-hats dept.

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."

17 of 710 comments (clear)

  1. I'm more worried about... by Binestar · · Score: 5, Funny

    Wearing a Red Shirt while on the enterprise.

    Oh wait, nevermind...

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    Do you Gentoo!?
    1. Re:I'm more worried about... by jeremy_hogan · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:I'm more worried about... by malfunct · · Score: 5, Informative
      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.

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  2. What My Organization Did: by Captain+Tenille · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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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    1. Re:What My Organization Did: by stand · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Seriously, if you don't need Redhat support and don't want their Enterprise features, why would you use Redhat on a server? *BSD or Debian would be more reliable, and Gentoo, LFS, or Debian would be much more customizable.

      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.

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  3. IMHO, you answered your own question by aborchers · · Score: 5, Insightful
    When you said


    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.


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  4. Why bother at all? by TCM · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

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  5. Security Patches by DreadSpoon · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Upgrade every year? by orev · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Versions by ceswiedler · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  8. In 5 years... by NathanE · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  9. For what it's worth by npietraniec · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  10. Support for Oracle... by nyc_paladin · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  11. Discussed on beowulf list by Col.+Klink+(retired) · · Score: 5, Informative

    This was recently discussed on the Beowulf list.

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  12. Advanced Server by irix · · 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...

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  13. Which RH do *WE* use? by stanwirth · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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:
    • While RH is the market leader in the US, SuSE is the market leader in the EU. So going with the Open Source market leader because that's where the best support and latest developments are going to come from doesn't give you an answer.
    • While Oracle is doing a lot of work directly with RH, IBM is doing a lot of work directly with SuSE. So going with the distro that has support from a large and highly skilled corporate because that's where the best support and latest developments are going to come from -- also doesn't give you an answer.
    • Both use RPM, so if you're used to doing RPM from the command line, there is simply no change. It's very rare that I run across an RPM or a source package built for RedHat that has even minor glitches on SuSE.

    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.

  14. Re:benefits Odd. by vladkrupin · · 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 /usr/kerberos) and OpenSSL dependency on it. That change alone broke (on source level) essentially every package out there that depends on OpenSSL and doesn't care about Kerberos. There are others
    </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 /. for the same $/hour right now, so I should probably just shut up)

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