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The Increasing Cost of Red Hat Linux?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I work at a company with a large number of Linux servers in the data center. We're currently evaluating what distribution we want to use moving forward. Upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise from 7.2 would cost ~$350k just for the systems we already have deployed. Due to the change in Red Hat's release policy, we either have to move to Enterprise, or change distributions. Also, we don't have Oracle on any of these systems, but we will need it in the future. This leaves us with rather limited options. I'm interested hearing what other Slashdot readers are running, and planning?"
Debian works well and the price is right! Wonderful install procedure too.
And I'm planning to go home and play America's Army.
I may need to reboot 3-6 hours from now, but I've never had to learn how to edit a configuration file.
(Disclaimer: That's not really true, but you get the point.)
paintball
Usually, enterprises aren't interested in free or next to it. They want stable and supported for a stable price.
How much more would Suse cost? I have worked at facilities before that switch from windows to Suse recently and they said it was a lot less expensive in the long run.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
does that cost include count the SCO license?
oh come on, thats not flamebait!
We made the upgrade. Its a godd choice. You know what you get, you get oracle/ibm/big gun stuff.
AND
you support open source / free software.
I, for one, welcome our new RedHat overlords.
*giggle giggle, snort snort* I made a funny just like the others that used this quote did!
Have you evaluated the cost of moving to the supported versions of SuSE, etc? What's the cost there? How does it compare to Red Hat?
Also, if you find you don't need support, then why use the "enterprise" editions at all?
Finally, what'd be the total cost of moving to Windows? Probably a lot more than $350k, I'd wager. It sucks, but it's probably just time to pay the piper, or deal with supporting yourself... that's just how the market is. RH have to make a profit somehow.
The Free desktop that Just Works
I think the first thing that should be asked is, what do you need to do with it? Distros have a strengths and weaknesses. If you just ask, what distro, you end up with a giant flame war over which distro is better. Also, Have you considered possibly using a version of *BSD?
Slashdot...it's like Fox news, but without the biased sl...or maybe not.
Seriously, we use Debian / Qmail for pop3, Debian / Apache for web, Debian / DBJDNS for dns, and Freesco for Dhcp and firewall.
If you're running or will be running Oracle you probably want RedHat, but do you need to upgrade all of your boxes?
Vertical
72 CD D7 52 D0 7E D8 47 44 91 D5 84 D1 59 F1 A9-This is my 128bit integer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Switch everything over to Debian and spend the $350k on "training" and new laptops.
Better yet, spend $300k on training/laptops and get yourself a nice bonus for cutting $50k from the budget.
Read, L
If you're looking for support (which is what I'm assuming your reason for going with Enterprise server is), then either pay for Advance Server or go with a different cheaper distribution and put the money you saved into someone that can search Google and find out how to make "RH only" stuff work on Debian or something.
We run oracle (both 8 and 9) on Debian, as well as most of our internet infrastructure (with the exception of proprietary programs that are stuck on Win2K for the time being). Most of the vendors of Linux based apps that we have worked with are willing to provide support even with Debian being the distro we chose (and then the ones that have complained, I've just called for another technician that was more distro-agnostic and gotten right through).
Debian. Or Slackware. Just be sure to have a copy of either Knoppix or Slackware Live CD handy. Write down what the CD auto-detected. Select appropriate odules when installing proper distro.
And MySQL for the database.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Switch to BSD! I hear FreeBSD is nice. Also in the enterprise. And a license that does not make $neckties nervous.
You can just make your own build of redhat. Every piece of the OS is available as source rpms from redhat themselves, for every linux OS they sell.
Get em, compile em and install em. Of course, the nice gui installer is not free, nor is the support. But updates and the OS itself is free and will always be free. Its GPL'd. What you pay for is support and peace of mind. Thats typically what data centers prefer these days. I know that the managers see only free as in beer, so they look like heroes for saving on the budget, but what really counts is uptime and reliability. TCO stuff. So it costs 350K... How much would Windows cost you, and how much functionality would get from it? How about the equivilant PA-RISC machines or big AIX boxes? E15k's?
It turns out to be quite a deal! The support you get is worth it, and compare the price of that to a support contract with Sun!
Redhat is no longer going to be making public releases, thats the point. There wont be any RH 10 or 11. RH9 is it for the free distro's from redhat. They are moving to data center class high end stable stuff, rightfully so IMHO. Now they can compete with the big boys in the big boys playground, which can't hurt linux. There are plenty of free unsupported alternatives to redhat out there for the budget minded.
You need to look at what you are paying for, and what you need. With Redhat you're paying for a package (eg, physical box of stuff), some of their packaging expertise, a small amount of their own custom goo, and presumably support. You're also indirectly funding GNU and Linux development. If that's not worth $350k, there are a number of options out there.
I personally use FreeBSD. No, I'm not suggesting you switch, but since I use it I'll detail it as another point of view. I download the software, for free, and pay no licenses. I also don't get a pretty box, support, and I've done nothing to fund development. The pretty box is available, for a fee. Support is available from a number of companies, for a fee. You can fund development as much or as little as you like with donations.
Without telling us what you need, we're not going to be able to make a recomendation. Maybe you use some Red Hat "feature" a lot that's worth $350k/yar, maybe you don't. What I can tell you is there are more expensive (price Microsoft!), and less expensive (eg, FreeBSD) options. There are also many, many, many options in the middle.
If you are sick of RedHat's extortive licensing fees that you instead switch to Windows XP... :)
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
That's esentialy what you are paying for if you go with the RedHat enterprise. The assesment you need to make is;
1. Do you need that level of support.
2. Is there a cheaper way to achive the level of support you do need.
3. Dose 1 or 2 requiere switching vendors.
For the cluless. It has nothing to do with the software itself. I.e. You can download RedHat and install it on as many PCs as you like virtualy free.
PS: Support for large numbers of critical solaris and/or Windows servers costs just as much or more. I should know since I work for a company that makes most of it's money off this sort of thing.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
The strategy I'm taking is to use the RedHat high end products for running commercial applications (like Oracle). For everything else, standard RedHat is fine. The developers like that RedHat keeps pace with the new stuff they're working on.
/etc/sysconfig, /etc/profile.d, etc... very modular.
The advent of http://www.fedora.us bodes well for the future. I expect to see more 3rd party support for the RedHat standard package. That's the nice thing about RedHat finally opening up their devel process.
At worst, you could just take the standard distro that RedHat bases their advanced products on and use the security patches from the advanced on the standard distro. For example, install RedHat 7.2 and install any patches from the currently support advanced product. The only thing is that you'll have to rpmbuild --rebuild the src.rpm's as they are released.
I really like RedHat's way of doing things. I like their python based configuration programs. I like
And who'd 've thunk... RedHat is basicallly IPv6 ready out of the box. I didn't notice that until recently. Very easy to setup 6to4, radvd, etc. Even Mozilla is compiled with --enable-ipv6. Thanks RedHat!
Red Hat are in business to make money - they do this by providing paid-for distributions with full support, custom-tweaked kernels and applications, and provide a validated platform on which to run commercial apps like Oracle.
Want to put that together yourself? Go for it, nobody at Redhat is stopping you. All the stuff they integrate in their product is free, just go do it yourself.
But don't complain because you can't do it yourself and don't see why you should pay Redhat to provide you with a quality product.
Its not like you don't have a choice of vendors, or that your apps only run on a single vendor's platform.
Linux is never free - you either pay for it with money, or you pay for it with your commitment to the GPL and/or the time you invest into making it work for you.
We need people like you in the Linux community i.e. 'waah waah linux is too expensive, even when i can download it for free' like we need a frickin hole in the head.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
One thing that you get with the licenses is centralized updating from redhat's servers. I find that on my networks, its easier to setup your own server and do it yourself. That way you don't have to pay RedHat and depend on each of your servers getting it from an outside source, you just need to have your update server grab it and share.
Of course, companies like redhat are good for businesses as well, because a lot of companies don't have the time to do a lot of their own support (or the technical savvy/staff), so having that option out there is a definite plus.
"Sed Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?" -Juvenal
Debian is as stable as you can get. If they want the support, they can hire someone to do it in house (and in doing so contribute back to the movmement), or pay another company for support. The cost either way will undoubtedly be less then shelling out more than $350K for Red Hat, licenses. I Vote DEBIAN, but I am sure would work as well ;0)
Fuzzy_The_Quantum_Duck
=0)
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Damn Slashdot cut the last 2 Chars from my name!!!
What do you want? Enterprise-level support without paying for it? Do you think that the support contracts offered by HP, IBM, Sun, or Microsoft will have more value for less money?
This is the Free Software movement, not the Free Support movement. You can still download the software for free, and pay some kids $20 an hour to support it if that's what you want. Quit complaining that the world doesn't give you everything you want for free.
The value of Red Hat for an enterprise is not that the software is free of charge. The value of Red Hat is that the source is free from restrictions. Other than that, they're just like any other enterprise Unix vendor.
You want to run Oracle with Red Hat, period. (Well, you want Red Hat unless you want to pony up 250k for a sunfire box, or go back to 2003. Saving money is the objective, right?)
However, you can safely run other servers on GPL Red Hat, or Debian, or SuSe, or....
We moved to BSD for most of our Unix needs.
Someone please explain this claim. I have no experience with buying anything from Red Hat, but I was certainly under the understanding that the software was freely copyable. Further, if you bought one copy you should be able to install it on as many systems as you wanted. Sure, support is an issue. And if you want Red Hat to give lots of support for a lot of systems you should expect to pay for it. But couldn't AC and his company hire more people and support the systems themselves with that $350k? Don't they need support staff anyway to work with Red Hat? They would have to have support staff if they moved to Debain or other distros, so is there really a reason to move rather than stay with Red Hat and support yourself? Is there something about using Red Hat that I'm unaware of? Where is this $350k cost coming from?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
By all means, get Redhat support if you're just trying to make your company feel good about spending money on something. But their support is terrible. By terrible I mean completely worthless at solving any sort of problem easy or complex, big or small.
They aren't much worse than anyone else's support so far as I have experienced. But still somehow I was shocked at just how completely worthless they are.
We're currently evaluating what distribution we want to use moving forward.
Well, you could install just about any distribution on a laptop and hook it up to one of those Evolution Robotics laptop robots. Those go forward (and backward, and sideways) quite easily. Oh, you meant in the future? Well, why didn't you say so?
Pointy-Haired Boss: "We need to do this on a going-forward basis!"
Dilbert: "Thanks for ruling out time travel. You're usually not that helpful."
Cheers,
IT
Power corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
My company has hired a small independent Linux technical support provider to help with this.. They have a service where they create patches and updates for RH 6.2-8.0 when new security vulnerabilities are out. They test them, package them as RPM, and distribute. So when 12/31/2003 comes around, you don't have to upgrade to 9.0 if it isn't feasible.
Its kind of expensive and may not work for everyone, but its worth a look:
http://www.pantek.com/linux.php?subsect=rhupdates
In this economy when the "big" Linux players are worried about the "big" issues, I prefer working with a smaller company like these guys because they work harder to make their mark.
I'm not saying it's the answer to your problem, I don't know, you'll have to decide.
Now, before we move on I'm going to tell you how Debian sucks. This is not to say that other distributions do not suck, or that Debian sucks more or less than the others - this is just something that you might run in to and should be aware of.
Debian sucks because:
Yet, we chose Debian because it rocks (and RH sucks) in these areas:
For a server you put in a data center and don't want to touch again unless absolutely necessary, I think Debian is great. It is extremely easy to stay up to date with security, and that is pretty much all there is to it. I still have nightmares from the days where I was mirroring entire RedHat distribution trees (or at least their massive update directories) in order to keep those systems up.
But really - in the end - it is not a few hundred bucks per server that should make the difference. It is my impression that if you pay for your RedHat, you can have a nice update service as well.
You'll be shelling out thousands of dollars per server for the hardware, an order of magnitude more (over the years) for support (eg. your time), so a RedHat subscription fee really shouldn't stop you from going RH.
On the other hand, if some of the above made you think - I can promise you that Debian certainly is a viable alternative at least for the machines I've dealt with so far.
I personally believe that Slackware is the best server implantation that you can go with. It's the most Unix distro IMHO. Also you deal with source files, not RPM's, personally I greatly dislike the use of binaries. The best thing is that Slackware is Free, and it's stable. I know a lot of different people whom have had problems with Redhat, switched them over to Slackware, which has a slightly higer learning curve, but, they were happy with Slack.
Support, you say? Debian has a nice directory of qualified Debian consultants, and in general, it makes sense to have a few Linux experts inhouse to deal with emergencies.
How many hours of Redhat support did you use last year? Divide the number of hours into the support contract cost. If the hourly rate is over $100, (and I'm betting it will be way over) consider getting on-demand support from independent consultants, instead of using a pre-paid contract. Some consultants will even let you buy reasonable (e.g., 10 hour) blocks of support time, which you can use in small (5-15 minute) increments. You have MANY support options. Explore them to see which will save you the most.
Use any savings for training. As your in-house expertise increases, your support costs will decrease. The nice thing about Linux is you only have to pay for the support you need. Too many companies forget that.
Learn to use Google effectively too; 99.9% of all Linux questions I get in a year have already been answered, and are just a quick inquiry away.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
But this puts you in violation of your support license, resulting in its termination and therefore not being supported if they catch you.
However, this will result in the same level of support as if you still had a support license.
Never take recommendations from anyone who spells the word with two c's and just one m.
Laugh stupid, it's a joke.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
SuSe is cheaper than AS, how much cheaper i do not know. but unlike most distro's they offer an "Enterprise Edition."
They also offer priced to fit support, and now have the backing of IBM and Sun, and they support oracle.
and this is coming from a Gentoo zealot.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
Would that be 'msblaster' windows server 2003?
IntechHosting - Free domain, 2GB, PHP, £4.95/$8.95
Have you considered calling / writing to Red Hat's sales section with your concerns? You may be able to negotiate a more acceptable price. Especially where there's such a significant sum involved.
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Abort / Retry / Ignore ?
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There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The new "low cost" server option at my company is RHAS on a dual Xeon box connected to a huge EMC disk for network storage. F*$%ing overkill, bigtime. And they wonder why we can't do anything cheaply. This is the small, minimum production grade server standard embraced. JHMFC.
In my opinion (not so humbly, though), the only thing you're getting from big, expensive RH is the guarantee that Oracle will support whatever f-ed up configuration you come up with. It's still GNU/Linux at heart (there, RMS, ya happy now?) Sure, RH promises not to change it as often, but honestly I just upgraded an old RH server running 6.2. It's been running and stable for something like four years. It worked, so aside from patching and security, I left it the hell alone. This is something that large companies can't understand. Once it works, don't upgrade every damn chance you get - keep the old solid configuration running until you have the time and the need to do an upgrade.
Personally, since I believe that having three truly hard-core linux geeks that know their shit onsite is better than any professional support line you could ever call, I'd go with standard RH and order me some geeks instead. For $350k, you should be able to get a very nice set of them, and they'll be right there to save your ass if anything goes wrong.
This is why I have no future management prospects. I just can't think that way - I worked in small shops too long to think that throwing money at stuff fixes anything. We found ways to keep stuff running on a mix-and-match room full of old hardware - no support contracts, no officially supported configurations, just guys (and one lady) that knew what the hell they were doing. Once I moved into the big corporate world, I had to give myself a lobotomy to even understand their mindset towards problem-solving.
I'd consider this when getting the level of support you have priced from RH. Think about it: will there be many questions for which you are willing to pay $1000 a pop? Are there many questions to which you couldn't find an answer by Googling? Or is it more of a CYA action in case your team fouls up? I'd hate to think you'd be wasting over a quarter million dollars for an inept admin.
--Chag
...you really need to be careful about which distribution you choose. Officially, Oracle will only support their 9i Server product on RedHat Enterprise and SUSE Enterprise. It would be really bad to call Oracle for support only to be told you are S.O.L. because you're not running on a supported platform.
That being said, you can run Orcle 9i Server on other, less costly distributions. Personally, I run a development Oracle 9i server on debian 3.0 (woody).
The trick to Oracle compatability is the gcc and glibc versions. For Oracle 9i, you need gcc-2.95.4 and gblic-2.2.5. This happens to match exactly what debian 3.0 currently supports. Unfortunately, most other distributions have long since upgraded to gcc-3.x series and glibc-2.3.x, on which Oracle will not install or run.
To verify what versions of these packages a given distribution supports, you should use Distrowatch.com.
I was personally involved in porting our company's software to Linux. I chose to support Red Hat, thinking that their big name would mean that they were somehow better as an organization.
I WAS TOTALLY WRONG!
I recently tried phoning Red Hat Sales to try and buy support, and it has been more than 1 week, and I have been unable to get them to respond! My first 3 attempts to contact Sales were ignored, and finally I got someone on the phone. They directed me to someone else, and after an initial e-mail, they have yet to contact me after I sent them 2 follow-up e-mails. It is absolutely ridiculous.
You would in this day-and-age that Red Hat would be salivating over someone who is willing to pay them money for support, but they seem competely disinterested in helping me give them money. I have already complained to my superiors that we should consider supporting a different flavor of Linux, because if this is how responsive Red Hat's Sales unit is, imagine how unresponsive their Support unit it.
I haven't seen it mentioned anywhere whether this is a sales quote or a quick calculator job? Sales people are flexable, especially when it comes to big sales. If your calculating 350K there is probably a Red Hat representative out there who could make you very happy (and would be very happy). Of course if your company needs 350K worth of support, then you'll need to be more creative.
But this sound like someone who is quick with the calculator and just as quick to react.
Quack, quack.
You are high, or highly misinformed.
RedHat continues to develop a public release
the beta for the next release (redhat 10) is available right now for public consumption. The simply aren't providing shrink wrap at compusa anymore, I think what the original story is referring to is the fact that each public release is only supported for 1 year, which is unacceptable in a corporate environment, to have to upgrade the OS of production boxes every year is not acceptable, and therefore requires that people move to ES, because it has 5 years of support.
It's an annoying fact that you have to run AS if you want to run an Oracle DB on it or a BEA JVM. You can't get Oracle to install on RH8/9, and BEA will blow up on you with either of those distros. But you can get around this by running RH 7.2, which is was AS is based on. Oracle will install fine on that, and BEA will not blow up. Obviously you're not going to get support from Oracle/BEA if you let it slip that you're not running their software on AS. Oracle in particular is notorious for this.
What's even worse in some ways is that you have to use a two year old kernel. Thus you're stuck with inferior threading (among other things.) I've read a lot of this about how AS contains other "optimizations" for running things like Oracle that makes up for this. I think it's a load of BS. You do get built-in clustering (piranha), though you could get the RPMs for that.
At my company we run AS on our Oracle db in production. It's one of about 20 Linux servers we have there, and the only one not running RH8. In our dev/qa enviros we run Oracle on RH 7.2. We do not run BEA becuase we didn't want to run AS on our app server farm.
I agree. I have never dealt with any sales organization as unresponsive and unmotivated as Redhat's.
Fast forward to end of 2002, and we had become disgusted with Red Hat's road map for its' Advanced Server license. It seemed as though we had lost all of the benefits of the GPL.
There was no way we were going back to M$, but there was a movement from higher up top to change distributions. To make a long story short, we passed on SuSe and chose the often corporately overlooked Gentoo.
The benefits of this move are stunning. We have been able to hire 16 additional employees to handle our own fork of Portage, and 22 additional employees to provide support. Not only to we do a "ghost compile" for each box (many different Pentium and Athlon systems), we also take a minimalist approach. The combination of those two choices have enabled us to increase performance per box to something like 26% faster on average.
With the obvious help of the Gentoo open source community, we have created a low cost, self-sustained IT department that can function well into the next decade. Thanks Gentoo!
Care to back that up with some evidence? $dudeWhoAnsweredThePhone at Red Hat a while back told me they were still going to release the free stuff, just not support it for nearly as long as they have been.
Here's what you do:
1. Hire 1-5 high school Linux geeks part-time.
2. Pay them 15-20k a year. They will rejoice! Sweeten the deal with an unlimited supply of Twinkies, Mountain Dew and Hot Pockets.
3. Sit back.
4. In your next conference with the big cheese, tell him how smart you are for solving the company's IT problems.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
At $350K to upgrade, you are talking a serious number of systems. I'm not saying you can talk them into giving it to you for free but whoever is doing the purchasing should be able to negotiate something better than full retail. You are mainly buying support so things to point out include multiple identical systems, internal support for end-user systems, etc. that mean they won't have to answer too many really dumb questions.
Favorite really dumb support question: do I have to plug it into the electricity?
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Yahoo and Microsoft's own hotmail run on FreeBSD. Also the apache team uses FreeBSD as their os choice on their servers. FreeBSD handles large amounts of i/o and tcp/ip traffic and that is its strength's. SMP support and threading are its weaknesses.
Just my two cents.
Also you can run Oracle if you install the Linux abi package on FreeBSD.
http://saveie6.com/
That's riddiculous. Less than $350K? For an installation that large, they will obviously need more than one person for the job. Even if they get a coupe of kids right out of college, there's still a good chance the salaries will be in the $50K range. Hire 3 people, and within 2 years you're within the $350K range. And, all this is assuming the people you hire are as skilled with Linux as a Red Hat support professional.
I'm curious about a couple things. First, what do people call Redhat support for? I mean, I understand if you have a 9i cluster or something but what else? You could google a fix in way less time for pretty much any Redhat problem. How often do people have problems with their Redhat Linux systems? When 7.2 was out, I had Redhat 4.2 machines running on P-233Mhz with 100 web hosting customers each happily humming along with 1000+ day uptimes.
Once I moved into the big corporate world, I had to give myself a lobotomy to even understand their mindset towards problem-solving.
This is required at most corperations for accepting a management position.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
It depnds upon your budget needs..
You have already mention the need to use Oracle which is $5k per cpu..
If you switch distros you want to make sure you are not placed in the saem decision 6 months or 2 years down the road again..
Thus I recommend looking into using debian instead of SuSE..
As you know SuSE is partnering with vendors such as Sun and thus wil be in the same bussiness model as Red Hat in wanting to charge for enterprise versions either through support or etc..
Do not forget to factor in training costs of employees of going from distro to the next...
Also do the idiot checks, take a demo/dev version of Oracle and do test installs on the distro your considering..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
I think the main issue is that we want to run Red Hat, but even with extra geeks, it's not going to help the security patch issue. Phone or email support isn't a big deal for people that already know how to support Linux in house.
After 12 months, you either upgrade, to the new buggy unstable version, or you stare at bugtraq all day and hope that nothing you are running comes up with a new security hole.
That's really not an option. RH is screwing up big time.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Now, I have 70 Linux servers around the country, and a steady stream of new customers. I've been installing Redhat 8.0 on new deployments because 9.0 doesn't work well with our application. So, we've everything from 7.0 through 8.0 in the field. Over the past few months, Redhat dropped up2date support and patches for Redhat 7 and 7.1. I feel guilty installing 8.0 on new boxes because I know support for it will be dropped at the end of the year.
I don't wish to buy into Redhat AS or ES because I don't understand what I'm paying for. *I'm* the Redhat support. I just need something that will receive patches and support for more than one year. The 5 year lifespan of the ES versions is nice, but I've NEVER called Redhat for support. I don't plan to.
I build the kernels for each of the servers. I use vanilla kernel.org source with XFS. We sell 2, 4 and 8-way servers. Am I missing out on anything from the "optimized" Redhat Advanced Server kernels? What are other people in this situation doing?
I think it's confusing because we initially chose Redhat for the accountability aspect of having a corporation behind the distro. Now, I'm not sure who they're targeting. I would imagine that most firms that select Redhat Advanced server and are willing to pay the price (>$1000/license) would have a staff talented enough to support it. So why the mandatory support costs from Redhat?
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
Gentoo and AMD rulz! Intel sucks and so does windows!
Basically earlier this year Red Hat announced a fork in their product line. They now have Red Hat Linux (the open source distro still freely available) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The current version of RHEL is 2.1 which is based on Red Hat Linux 7.2, but there is currently a public beta that people can register to try for the next version of RHEL.
RHEL comes in several flavors, WS (workstation), ES (Enterprise Server), and AS (the old Advanced Server). RHEL software will be maintained for up to 5 years from it's release and telephone and other support options are available for it. I don't remember the cost per box, it varies based on the product you buy but you can find the most current pricing at Red Hat Ordering Site . Notice that RHEL ES is $350, this includes a 1 year Red Hat Network subscription to get your updates.
Now the weird thing is the license. Basically Red Hat only distributes open source software, we all know what that means, but the Enterprise line of products come with a license agreement that is written to cover the product, not the individual pieces of software. Every RHEL box that you have installed MUST be paid for. If you install 2 boxes off the same set of software with out purchasing a RHEL license, it invalidates all RHEL licenses at your site. However, I know that there are dispensations made for development vs. production machines. A Red Hat salesperson explained it to me once, but the knowlege has been displaced by something more important.
All the while the Red Hat Linux product line will also be freely available. The difference between the two is basically support and lifecycle. The Red Hat Linux product is not supported outside of the software being maintained for up to one year after it's initial release. The Red Hat Linux product will continue it's 4-6 month release cycle while the Red Hat Enterprise Linux product is every 12 to 18 months.
Someone in an earlier thread made the comment that now the Red Hat Linux (free) product would now be an unstable platform, that Red Hat was now making every product a major release. Yes every product is not versioned as a major release, 8, 9, 10, etc. However, the beta for 9 was actually called 8.0.xx and the beta for 10 is called 9.xx which leads one to believe that in the early stages of Red Hat Linux 9 that it was actually going to be called 8.1!!! Perhaps there was some versioning decision made in the marketing/management ranks over there. Either way, outside of a little gcc kruft which was not Red Hat's fault, Red Hat Linux 9 has been rock solid for me, and I should continue to expect a STABLE product coming from them in this area. New features will be made in the Red Hat Linux platform first, then they will be pulled into the RHEL product as it evolves.
Anyway, that's my understanding of how it works after talking with a bunch of people over at RH.
--Runz
I'm estimating that you have 150-200 servers (depending on what RH package you get). If those servers aren't generating revenue, or supporting a business unit that generates revenue, it's time to downsize your datacenter. $350K sounds like a lot of money, but it's all relative to revenue. If it's only 2% of last quarters revenue, then why would you consider making a huge IT change just to save a few bucks. Again, if $350K is really a lot of money for your business to be spending on OS upgrades, than maybe it's time to downsize that datacenter because it's not generating the revenue to justify it's existance.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
The catch; using a commercial piece of software in the mix. In our case, a certain database. Being closed-source and totally non-self-servicable in case of serious problems or bugs, it is imperative to have a support contract for the commercial software. Almost all the RDBMS vendors have now altered/clarified their support policy: they will *not* honor a paid support agreement if you are running the free version of Red Hat underneath their software.
Why this policy exists is a question I will let somebody else speculate about...
There is exactly one major RDBMS vendor I could find that will officially support its software running on the free version of Red Hat (as of April 2003, at least), and that vendor is IBM with their DB/2 product.
Unfortunately, we were too time-constrained to port our system to DB/2, so in the end we caved and paid for Red Hat Enterprise so we could get RDBMS support on our existing platform. To this day we have not called Red Hat tech support once and don't expect to do so, ever. The thousands of dollars we paid covered the 3 minutes of effort the sales guy put in over the phone. Not a bad deal for Red Hat. If I were starting from scratch, knowing about the new support policies from the RDBMS vendors, I would have done the project using DB/2. PostgreSQL would have been an even better choice, except our project required real-time database replication, and PostgreSQL is just now getting to the point where that works well enough.
If you buy servers from IBM, HP, or Dell (among others), you can just buy support hours - and for a lot less.
Rather than buy the OS for every server, buy the support, and just copy the OS. It's my understanding that this is permitted with RH AW/ES/AS. If you don't need the enterprise version, then don't use it.
-Mark
I run a small computer consulting company, one thing I usually do is replace their linksys/dlink/netgear broadband router with a linux box. Although much smaller in scale that what you are talking about, I moved from redhat to debian for the exact same reasons you are talking about. Once RH moved to its frequent .0 releases with one-year updates, I knew I had to pick a different distro. Debian is fast, stable, and compact compared to red hat. The package system kicks major ass as well. I don't need support, the only problems I have ever run into were hardware related (or my own stoopid errors)... I will, however, say that dselect is one nasty mofo of a whatever it is... If I want a new package, I just search the debian site for it, and use apt-get. Like others have said, if the support is what you need, you will have to evaluate whether its cost-effective vs other major unix-y providers. If security updates is what you want, then there are several cheaper alternatives to red hat. Redhat needs to provide an alternative for those who don't want actual support, but do need long term updates for multiple years - otherwise, they will see their piece of the Linux pie shrink. That may be what they want, it may be a simple business decision on their part to make mo money. However, I know many, many people who are ditching red hat for the exact reason I did.
Styrofoam IS biodegradable, you're just impatient!
that you're only required to upgrade to Enterprise edition. In our case we run Oracle cluster(RAC) we've no choice but to use a more expensive Advanced Server(AS) version. Oracle only supports Oracle cluster on RedHat AS atm, regardless of the fact that AS provides no extra value to the extra cost. E.g. we paid more to buy AS just for more options like High Availability, but we've to turn it off for Oracle cluster to work properly. Why force us to pay more for something that doesn't work with your damn product? After much protests Oracle plans to support RAC on Enterprise edition NEXT YEAR. #$@$
:)
Many posters up there thought that one can always seek support elsewhere. They're obviously don't understand the situation or haven't work in the same field. You could say Linux supports can be found everywhere, but we can hardly find support for the commercial apps on them. Say if Oracle only offers supports on Redhat AS, you've no chance to seek support from Oracle when you're running it on, say, Debian, though it works perfectly in my experience.
However, don't get me wrong. I just rant about the increasing cost but Oracle+Redhat solutions are still the most cost effective around. Oracle and Redhat aren't stupid, they'll increase cost up to the point that you still think it's worthy to pay. (unlike Microsoft, their stupid licensing pratices made a lot of companies around here switch already
To demonstrate that if a company starts acting like MS it gets treated like MS. I'd take a hard look at the transition costs moving to SuSe. It'll take some testing, no transition is painless. I like Suse Enterprise servers, so I'll admit to some bias. Hey, you have to have standards. When a Linux provider starts acting like MS (forced upgrades, ever escalating prices) maybe it's time to bitch-slap them back into line.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Over the last 6 months, I've noticed a declining interest in KRUD, which I attribute to several factors (low cost bandwidth due to broadband reducing the demand for CD distributions, more commercial distro users moving to more expensive Red Hat versions, and others). Interestingly, this has come at a time when many people have stated an interest in continued support of older Red Hat distributions because of the new Red Hat End Of Life announcements.
We'd like to be able to continue to do KRUD, and are exploring electronic distribution options, and broadening our offerings.
I think that KRUD provides a valuable service, both in providing an easy, secure, complete, up-to-date distribution, and in providing an alternative to Red Hat's soon to be discontinued 'hobbiest' versions.
Right now, we're evaluating providing support for 7.3 and 8.0 after Red Hat's End of Life in December. It's going to take us close to a full time engineer to do the updates, I estimate. So far, I've had only about 10 requests to provide End of Life support, which is not even close to being able to cover the costs to produce. The price would drop to a more reasonable level if more people order it.
It's interesting that many people are expressing interest for longer support for older Red Hat releases, but few seem to find any value in it.
If you're interested in pre-ordering, please feel free to contact me.
Geek Social Butterfly
This may be a troll, but most enterprises stay with whats working. Why do you feel the need to upgrade all your linux servers? What will a 2.4.22 kernel get you that your not getting with a 2.4.10? Oracle (and DB2) are not kernel dependent.
A new enterprise database? Fine start a new pilot project. Document honestly what you find and make a migration path. Decide on a Win32 migration path to MS SqlServer if you have too. Whatever is best for your company.
Your question demands more information.
Enjoy,
It's just the normal noises in here.
I say go with SuSE Enterprise Server.
It has some nice features like remote auto install and YaST for a very nice system installer and maintainer.
SuSE Enterprise also supports x86, IBM mainframe, I/P series IBM servers, Itanium2 and AMD Opteron processors. This gives you a lot of flexability to add new hardware to the network to improve performance and the knowledge that the new machines will run perfectly with exsisting servers.
SuSE also has great tech support services at a much lower rate than redhat. You can feel confident that your server software is also run by the German Government and praised! by them.
SuSE's max turnaround time for support is just 2 hours!
SuSE is also United Linux Compatible and LSB compliant.
Suse Prices are not too bad either:
x86 single server 749USD$
Itanium Single server 448USD$
Opteron Single CPU 448USD$
Opteron Dual CPU 767USD$
Opteron Quad CPU 1405USD$
Opteron 8 CPU 2585USD$
These include 1 Year Maintainance and Service.
At home I run the developer edition of the Oracle 9ias enterprise database as well as release 2 of the Oracle 9ias Application server. I have successfully installed to Red Hat (version 8.0 not Enterprise), Mandrake and also a Debian Distribution. At work we are running a development environment on Red Hat 8.0 and production using Solaris 8. Since we are using pure java and j2ee code our software runs flawlessly across the systems with no changes whatsoever, even considering the fact that some of the developers on the project run Windows systems on their desktops where they actually write some of the source code modules!
If you expect support from Oracle concerning an Oracle installation of any kind whatsoever on Red Hat Linux you best be using Enterprise and yes the support pricing is quite high compared to what most of us are used to running Linux over the years.
I would suggest running your most critical servers on Red Hat Enterprise and if you have supporting environments, perhaps a development or test environment, use Red Hat 8.0 (or even Debian or Mandrake) and save yourself some cash outlay in that way.
If you have the talent within your staff to self support I can attest to the fact that Oracle products run as advertised on Red Hat 7.3 and 8 (have not yet tried 9) using the install procedures Oracle outlines for use on Red Hat Enterprise, but as has already been pointed out, Oracle will not support installations with problems unless you have the Enterprise edition as your underlying Linux Distro.
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
I've been trying to figure this out, and it would seem that there is nothing in the license that stops you being able to legally give me a copy of (say) RHES, and for me to run that copy, with no access to up2date and no support contract. (Like a lot of the other posts say, I am the support - my only concern is having a platform that commercial software supports!)
The license seems to refer to the services that come bundled with the software, not the software itself. I believe that the JVM cannot be copied from the standard distribution but removing is trivial.
Interesting notes: to summarise, it's probably perfectly legal for you to copy me RHEL ES, however you would probably also have to provide me all the updates if I wanted them (which may violate your license to receive them). The big dollars is with regard to the updates, and I believe they are made publically available by SRPM - and even then, its probably also technically allowable for you to mirror all the update RPMs somewhere.
I installed Lotus Domino recently on a Debian server because I didn't trust the machine with a consumer Red Hat and it wasn't cost effective enough to get RHEL. I'd be very interested to hear if you can or can't just copy/mirror RHEL.
You learn next to nothing in school, it's really impressive when you think about it. They manage to make entire classes in which you have to absorb volumes of material and yet somehow, if you memorize every detail of that material and retain it, you still only walk away with a 10th of what you figured out playing with the subject on your own the first week...
You don't learn in the classroom, it's primary purpose is to give a piece of paper and 4yr+ setback on the world of technology. You learn in the field.
Right now I am writing this on Slack 9, I agree with you but the average Linux sys admin has trouble even comprehending how to recomp a kernel! The problem is db apps like Oracle! It still uses the 2 series gcc and won't work on Slack 9 unless you back compile a separate kern yourself, you can install both 3. series gcc and 2.95 the problem is linking them to the glibc right! then you need to forget your XF86config 4.3 alltogether unless you check out which X version you need for 2.95 gcc, and run a separate X with it (in general a can of worms) It will work if you do it right but then you need to use X with some of the Oracle guis! Catch 22. The Oracle library deps are out of date! You are screwed if you make even the simple mistake of not installing X quite right. I am sure that there is someway to build Slack to run Oracle but this is a little bit of a long way around. Might be a good idea to document the process! I love Slack also for its transparent in your face approach, you even need to enable permissions so users can burn cds, or access /dev/cdrom for that matter! It is a great way to force people to learn real unix style security! A little draconian but I sure love to be able to easily take a pico at my security logs without using an X gui first! I am not up to speed yet on VI and Emacs, so pico is a God send! Maybe thats why redfat nuked it, to make it harder for sys admins to run without their versions of guis, hey that almost sounds like a MS trick. Nah they couldn't be that stupid, could they?
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
I buyed RH many times, but never the profesional or enterprise version. They were too expensive for my country(3rd world one). :-(
When RH decided to drop the 20-250$ price products, they left that price window it open for all other distros to come in and steal RH market share.
I'm too don't know what to do and what to recomend to my customers. Suse? Mandrake?
If you have only 100$ to spend in a server OS, then, you wont be running RH, and that is just plain sad.
Get my e-mail after a captcha test in: http://tinymailt
FUD, Wrong Assumptions, Wrong asserted conclusions. Lot's of rude and incorrect accusations flying around. First, go read the section in the link below about "roll your own"
h tml
http://www.redhat.com/advice/ask_shadowman_may02.
Then set up a mirror of the RedHat Advanced Server Source RPMS, and a mirror of the Source RPMS of the RedHat Advanced Server Errata. Now, go read
http://current.tigris.org
Now, take a redhat 7.2 server, with minimal install and kernel dev bundle, do "rpm -qa --last" and then build the AS packages in the order they were installed on a 7.2 server. Installing each one after you build it. Put the binaries into your own CURRENT server. Now, go read
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=6473
You can create your own Linux distribution with the same updates that RedHat Advanced Server has, and it will have the same lifecycle that RedHat Advanced Server has.
The only thing you don't get is RHN, Support from RedHat, and "certified" compatibility and support form RedHat Certified ISV's like Oracle, BEA, IBM, HP, Dell, Netcool, BMC etc.....
Also, your costs are out of whack. RedHat Edge Server Basic subsciption
only costs about $350/year per dual proc server.
At my company we "rolled our own" distribution based on RHAS Source RPM's and we maintain our own CURRENT server with the errata. But we still buy RHAS licenses for servers where we are running 3rd party software that offers RedHat Certification.
-Ben.
With that many machines, you'll get better pricing. The organization that I work for (which is huge, but has about 200 linux boxes) pays approximately $200/box.
For us, it was worth it because we are guaranteed a supply of patches & support for a minimum of five years. Red Hat public releases churn every 18 months or so, which is too much work to maintain.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
listen, let's remember here people.. redhat was one of the first linux distrubtions, and they lost a lot of money & market share because they supported GNOME rather than the 6-12-months-ahead KDE project, all because they wanted a completely GPL'ed solution. They sued SCO first, so don't forget, they are in this on the politics side, not just for the money.
"... I declare our city to be a free and independent state to be named Tri-Insula!" --Fernando Wood, Mayor of NYC 1861
...But why doesn't he just upgrade to RH9 for his Oracle app and run another distro for the other stuff? Certainly, many data centers carry a variety of OS on their servers... Even in our (mostly) Windows back room, we have a couple Solaris machines and a couple Linux boxes and everything works out just fine. (Except for the Windows stuff which present constant niggling, unexplained/undocumented problems. Exchange server? What a nightmare. Thank god it isn't the actual external mail server or the real relay.)
Anyway, this is a bummer, because I certainly do appreciate what RedHat has done for the comunity. I know MY first box ran RedHat. It is too bad the prices are so high, but if you run a business critical app, it is almost neccessary to have 24x7 support available. Even though you'll use it two or three times in your whole life, when you need it, your ass will be saved. I've called MS support one time and only did so after a lot of work...But finally, we had no choice. It was get the thing up or we're out of business. OK...We'll call Microsoft. They did suggest a lot of things we had already tried, but ultimately did help us. We had to pay something like $300 for the call, in addition to our enormous annual Microsofft budget, but we got it running.
My urge is to move everything to something else, but our CIO lives in the dark ages and won't listen to any suggestions that aren't Windows...Our two linux boxes function as load balancers for...IIS. They exist because our Win NT 4.0 balancers were choking and we didn't want to spend $25,000 on new Windows hardware to cover the same task. I weep because I know that the two balancers would serve the site better than the six win2k boxes which do the same job now. The Sun boxes were installed with the phone system. Same weekend, we put the Exchange 5.5 server in. You can guess which has gone down more times since.
Right now it is Exchange seven crashes, Sun ZERO. Not even a reboot in the last 12 months! And the last one was because of a wide-scale, longterm power failure that outlasted our UPS and generation capability.
Who did what now?
So I haven't really given you any answers, but I hope I've offered some good points to consider.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
In other words, you agree to pay money for each installation you make. That license also gives Red Hat the right to audit your "facilities and records" for a year, but that's another topic.
...responsible for several Redhat servers and workstations, I can tell you that we're beginning the process of switching to Debian.
Stable (if some of the software is a little outdated), easy to maintain and upgrade, no registration required to use apt (see how far you get on RHN without that), and far cheaper.
Ever looked at Mandrake ? It usually is rated better than RedHat on the desktop (and servers) these days, besides it is the closest to RedHat of all other distributions. And of course, if you're now willing to pay, just download the CDs and do it all by yourself.
Currently I am working with a lot of Sun kit - and their sales guys. They are absolutely thrilled with Red Hat's new pricing, becuase suddenly they are competitive again.
Consider - a small Oracle DB on a 2 processor machine. The cost of a decent 2 processor server is about $2000, and then the cost of RHAS is about $2700 as I recall. Suddenly the cost of a V240r doesn't seem that bad. We pick them up for a lot less than $4700. Of course we have a pretty good deal with Sun, and the poster may get a good deal with Redhat, but we've done the analysis, and RH does not stack up for us in this example. For me, in is interesting that we have said "no Linux", not because it is a "hacker OS" or it can't do the job - but because it is too expensive to deploy. And before anyone asks, we didn't do any TCO voodoo to prove the point!
Other things Sun have on their side:
- Scalability on the same architecture. Yep, I know 2.6 will scale, but it isn't even properly released yet. We develop on small machines (240s, 480s) and deploy on 15Ks without even thinking about it - apart from making sure that the app can use the CPUs
- Solaris - damn good OS, excellent support and an understanding of what enterprise computing is about
- Support. Judging by some of the comments here Redhat support is somewhat lacking. Having called regularly on Sun support, I can say it is quite exceptional - even when problems are not their fault, they will engage with other vendors to get a fix
As much as I (and I suspect much of the /. crowd as well) might like it, Oracle isn't going anywhere, just like Microsoft, BEA, or SAP. In fact, their indorsement of Linux clusters as preferable to Sun "big iron" for running major enterprise databases is a big feather in the cap of the whole open source community, and should be treated as such.
Personally, I think that Linux has an amazing future ahead of it in the server and workstation markets, and that companies like Oracle and IBM that have massive enterprise credibility will help to realize that potential.
Taco Bell raised their prices and their popularity went up. People thought that they were getting a "better" product.
..........FULL STOP.
At my last gig I was responsible for ~30 Linux servers, all running Red Hat. There were about 5 of them running RHAS 2.1 and the rest were running 7.x
I spent a couple of days with the Oracle DBA benchmarking our applications and found it interesting that 7.3 was a tad faster than RHAS 2.1. Hardware was IBM x345, dual 2.4GHz Xeons, 2.5GB RAM, ~200GB RAID 0+1. Yes, hyperthreading was disabled.
I find it odd that Red Hat's "Enterprise Linux" is missing some key enterprise features that can be found in its consumer distribution (such as Logical Volume Management). BTW, LVM is broken in Red Hat unless you compile your own kernel, otherwise you can't mount snapshots.
In any case, Red Hat's new pricing scheme is flat out extortion. I had enterprise support on my servers and ever single time I reported a problem, I was either delayed until I found the solution for myself online or flat out told "That's not supported." You might wonder what's not supported. How about LDAP authentication? The automounter?
There are some things about Red Hat that are wonderful. And some that are pretty good. In the wonderful category, their installer is just the bees knees. Especially if you're kickstarting your servers. RHN is a nice tool but fundamentally flawed in that you must use Red Hat's repository; imagine 30 servers downloading the same 45MB of RPM's over a T1 at the same time over https (which can't be cached). yum goes a long way towards fixing this.
Debian has some nice points but IMHO has a lousy installer and zero enterprise management tools (such as RHN for Red Hat). People have been bitching about the installer forever and nothing seems to be getting overhauled there.
If I were doing this from the ground up right now, I'd go with RH 9. Keep your eyes open and keep track of major releases by RH and evaluate for yourself when an upgrade is necessary. RHEL is made up of many components that have been deprecated in the mainstream release (such as CUPS, I think Sendmail may also be deprecated). For LVM features you need >8.0 anyway. Use yum for your package management, build your own local package repository, and spend a little time learning about the guts of RPM.
As far as I remember, what was different about RHAS compared to normal Redhat is that the AS version supports Asynchronous I/O, which standard versions of Linux don't have.
Asynchronous I/O allows the Oracle server to hand off disk writes to the OS, without having to hang around to find out whether it wrote ok. If your OS doesn't support asynchronous I/O, you have to simulate it with I/O Slaves, which is much slower.We are looking at Linux at the Co. I work for with over 60K users.
My issue with RH is there per-seat license for "EVERYTHING".
They have a per-seat cost for support of the os then there is a cost to have an internal Eratta server and a per-seat cost for each machine that you want to get updates from the Eratta server...
We had RH and SuSE flyout to out World HeadQuarters and give us their presentation of who they are and what they have to offer
The biggest issue I have with RH is they are not completely Open-Source... By this I mean that we asked them "What if we choose RH and pay for everything we need for say 5 years, then we decide we don't like RH supporting us and we want to pay someone else or do it ourselves, What can we no longer use that RH makes?
They didn' tlike this question at all
Their answer was that we could not use Eratta for our updates. We would have to remove and destroy the code for eratta.
We asked SuSE the sam question and their answer was "You lose nothing. You can use 'EVERY' piece of software that SuSE makes and distributes on their Distro ... Forever no matter who supports you."
So for me and the company I work for, I don't want to get stuck with a particular vendor cause they say I can't use a "VERY IMPORTANT" part of the updating of systems especially supporting over 60K desktops.
It seems RH is trying to get some sort of "Lock-In" with their products instead of trying to win loarg companies with their "excelent" support.
I thought Linux was about "No Lock-in" and otal freedom?
JasonJust a little info for you:
Postgres is one of the oldest and best supported dbms around. It doesn't have a couple of features Oracle has, but it is a highly superior product compared to most others in it's class. That's in a business setting anyways. MySQL is easy to use, relatively fast at simple operations. DB2 is nice. Good for big computers with lots of ram. That's my observation, there probably is no rhyme or reason to it. I have lots of ram, and I like DB2. It's just fun! MSSQL sucks rocks. I developed a lot of websites using MSSQL as a backend and just couldn't make it feel right. Oracle is great for big iron.
They say it's good on x86. I say Ellison is full of shit.
Here's my personal dbms preference list:
Business
DB2
Oracle
Postgres
MSSQL
MySQL
Hobby/Pleasure
MySQL
Postgres
DB2
MSSQL
Oracle(unless you are masochistic)
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
Why would this make the GPL people mad? The GPL is about Free Speech, not Free Beer. Try calling debian's tech support line before you start complaining about this.