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Heavy-Duty System Administration Utilities?
leandrod asks: "I am in the process of helping a small software company define the infrastructure for their major client's new system. It is a big country, and it is a medium-sized client planning on going big. We are planning to standardize on Debian GNU/Linux. I am aware I can have IBM Tivoli Maestro for GNU/Linux for production scheduling, and BEA's Tuxedo TP monitor, but they are unsupported under Debian. I am also aware of one or two free TP monitors, but they are either incipient or stagnating. I couldn't find a production scheduler. I know I can do lots with the standard tools, but keep in mind I am targeting a transaction-processing bureau for a big operation with hundreds of thousands of terminals and millions of users, something like a poor man's Wal-Mart, or even Visa. Are there vendors out there willing to support Debian or just GNU/Linux in general? If not, are there free software projects that accomplish the same thing?"
Perhaps this major client could fund development/maintenance on a missing piece of infrastructure.
Standardizing on Debian is a really lousy idea. At some point, your customer is likely to need or want commercial software (esp RDBMS), and they will find that Debian is simply not supported by any commercial software vendor. (To be honest, most non-Linux geeks have never heard of Debian)
Go with Red Hat or Suse. You might find that going with a more stable (from a support POV) Unix OS like Solaris may be a good choice for certain systems as well. The support costs are real, but a Tivoli Management environment would cost a helluva lot more if the IBM salesfolk talk your client into it.
If you in a signifigant transaction processing business, the money will come - spend the money now to start a Maestro or Tuxedo system so you don't need to waste valuable time (and lose business) later.
I also hate to say this a longtime Debian fan... but the major commercial distros aren't going anywhere. RedHat and Suse have built brands and have major money & support flowing in from corps like IBM & HP. Can the same be said for Debian, whose stable release is starting to get a little crusty?
Remember to ask yourself what you & your client needs and what is best for the business. Keep the tech-geek religious wars on Slashdot!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Check out Sun Microsystem's N1 Grid.
I hear Sun offering suport for Linux as well, these days
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Part 1: Rant (stay tuned for part 2) ... sheesh. Are you making a political statement or trying to support an enterprise need?
Why debian? Don't get me wrong -- debian is great for a lot of things, but
Focus on the tools you need _first_ and the OS they run on second. Getting a great OS with no tools is a lousy place to be, especially after a few months when the client has refused to pay some bills because things aren't working and you have to explain at a meeting between their CEO/CFO/VP of whatever and your CEO/VP/whatever exactly why not, and that to fix it they need to invest $X more in some other platform along with $Y to migrate.
Part 2: Some ideas
The TP monitor (e.g. CICS) is frequently done now in a database, so use begin trans, commit trans or rollback trans, and you've got transactions. At least until your database or number of users gets too big. Postgres is a good open-source database that has commercial support options and supports transactions. There are several others, sapdb I think is one. Not sure if mysql supports transactions or not. This is an area where a commercial app (DB2, Sybase, Oracle) may be a worthwile investment, especially if you get into clustering or HA hardware setups.
Many people use the J2EE framework. In open source that pretty much means jboss. Runs great on linux and you get to deploy lots of apache servers and use buzzwords like 'entity bean' and 'xml'.
What in the h*ll do you need to do schedule-wise that can't be done in anacron and some simple shell-scripting? There is a reason there aren't really any open source schedulers: cron and anacron are ubiquitous and do what they do extrememly well.
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
IT is infrastructure for companies. It is not (arguably ever) their essential business. Their essential business is a combination of management, sales, accounting, production and assorted support procedures for the aforementioned as well as for their clients. Each stream of the gigantic process that is the company has specific tool requirements. I can not see a sustainable model wherein an IT department (outsourced or not) could keep up to its clients' necessities from any monocultural standpoint. I'd rather prepare to separate each task to a platform that best supports it, then define these separations and make my staff follow the definitions, of course redefining where need arises.
Now as for small companies that cannot afford a multitude of servers, I'd offer a single solution that best fulfills most of their needs and that I would like to keep up and polished for them myself... A debian.
I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
Bruce Perens is leading the UserLinux project with the specific goal of creating a global "co-operative" if you like, of Debian GNU/Linux service provider companies (and consultants), with a completely Debian (ie. 100% Free Software) core. Additionally, the GNOME desktop has been standardized upon specifically to simplify custom/ proprietary development on top of UserLinux. See the homepage. The only thing might be the release-ready (version 1.0) timing; depends on your deployment timetable of course.
* The Humble Legend * Debian Enterprise: http://debian-enterprise.org/ * Homepage: http://soulsound.net/ * PGP Key: h
Talk to the guys at PerformanceIT.com. I haven't kept track of their recent developments but it seems to me they could satisfy most if not all of your requirements.
Note: I'm not fully unbiased. I have a friend that works there.
TP monitoring? I usually just keep an extra roll on the back of the toilet.
Debian is a great choice. Everyone complains about the old software, but the advantage for enterprise is the long release cycles. This is exactly what RH is shooting for with RH AS/ES. At my company we have a mix of RH and Debian. The Debian servers don't crash for no apparent reason(seems to be a kernel oops related to swapping, dumb on a www server with way more ram than it uses).
.. They could even setup thier own apt repository with Oracle specific software/patches.
Using debian for commercial stuff isn't as easy as it should be. Many companies don't support debian and seemingly have no desire to. One of those is Oracle. Oracle can be installed on Debian, and there are tons of docs out there to do it. In the end, if you really want debian, stick to your guns until you run out of bullets.
Another option, tell these companies you're gonna buy X dollars of thier stuff, but only if they make it run on debian on your hardware. If you're willing to spend a few million on Oracle, I'm sure oracle will make it work. The same goes for IBM. I know IBM does tons of software sales, and says they support RH/Suse, but theres no reason they can't make it run on debian.
I really dont understand why companies dont support debian(please no RPM vs. DEB), in spite of the long release cycles. IMO, it makes it the perfect candidate. Once something is released as stable, it will generally stay that release for at least a year, sometimes two. Oracle could begin to certify Debian/sarge now, and when its released they would have a deployment platform for quite a while. Hell
Scheduling is a lot more complex that I have seen anyone give credit for so far.
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Add in : multiple platforms, vendors in different countries with different time zones, holidays, cultures and calendars, (try matching our Julian or Gregorian calendar to a Lunar calendar), with varying schedules, such as cyclical/hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual. Matching them to accounting needs like a fiscal year that does not match the calendar year, production schedules that cross week and month boundaries, and online systems that are up or down different days of the week and things can get very crazy very fast.
I can point you to 2 companies that seem to offer the most complete solutions for multiple platform shops, other than IBM's Tivoli, which works fairly well from what I have heard:
First:
Cybermation in Canada makes a product called ESP:
http://www.cybermation.com/solutions/jobsch
They have a cute little site at:
http://www.replaceyourjobscheduler.com/sitel
I was at a very large company when they swapped over from the CA7 tool to this one on their MVS systems. I was impressed with the product and the company's support. That was 8 years ago or so, so I cannot vouch for the product or the company now, but I have heard only good things about them currently.
Second:
BMC markets a product called Control-M, with all kinds of modules including an Enterprise Manager: http://www.bmc.com/products/productlist/0,2831,19
I currently use this product in an MVS/Unix/WinNT/Oracle/SAP environment. It does work. It has it's issues and shortfalls, and we have some problems with support, but we have managed to complete our schedule across all platforms every day, with only a very few exceptions in the past 3 years I have worked with it. We run in excess of 10,000 batch/background processes per day across many platforms.
In all 3 cases, Tivoli, Cybermation, BMC, licensing can be a bit pricey. But if you research the products closely, and only license what you really need as opposed to what you think you need, you can get by.
I also strongly suggest you hire an experienced scheduler to help out. This is a very undervalued and complcated specialty. Like programming, many can muddle through but few are truely good at it.
Tom
As far as IBM is concerned, money talks. If you are planning a 100,000 seat Debian deployment and want IBM tools, contact IBM sales and tell them. If enough people ask, maybe Debian will become a supported platform.
Plenty of us inside IBM would like to see some free Linux distributions supported, but the company makes its decisions based on commercial pressures, not ideology, and right now not enough people want to run their enterprise on Debian, Gentoo or any other free (beer) Linux.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
And even though Debian is not an officially supported distribution, IBM *has* supported us. Mind you, we're not a real big shop (xSeries 330 with a 1 TB EXP300 array), but they've done a fantastic job and won our support.