Enterprise Wide Deployment

[john_s1]

Hey guys, for an enterprise wide deployment, what will you suggest and why among - Red Hat Linux, Suse Linux and Ubuntu Linux, also, do you think, we can negotiate the support pricing down?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

I'll answer backwards. There is a typical discount on support that Red Hat puts in support contracts. They are very tough in negotiations and rarely move down. To be perfectly honest, they are not the most ethical negotiators out there. They will not budge unless you represent a really big firm and a lot of money. I work for a division of News Corp and their stance was very, very, very firm.

They also seemed to think when we negotiated on the satellite update server that all systems that would connect to this update system would require an additional per workstation fee. That's where we drew the line and used yum instead of Satellite.

The best linux support people I've ever worked with are HP's Linux group from the response center.

In and ideal world, I'd license RH from Red Hat and take support for HP.

I've worked with Suse and I like it, but am more familiar with the inner workings of RH as an RHCE. I use Ubuntu on my laptop because they support its wireless cause and think its a solid distribution but won't claim I've used it on an Enterprise scale.

Now if you are willing to deal with some issues there is another very low cost alternative.

CentOS.

This is a recompile of Red Hat's source code, which they are not permitted to keep secret under the GNU license agreement. It works exactly like RH AS, the highest level.

Upside of CentOS:
1) Free
2) Support is available, even from Red Hat if you want.

Downside:
1) The team decided not to release certain critical bug fixes with clustering. I had to wait weeks for a major release.
2) Typically there is a 1-4 week lag on release of code that has been released by RH.

SEP

[Heironimus]

It depends on what software you need to run. If you're dealing with commercial products you'll need to be on a certified platform to get support from the vendor.

[Van den Broeck Tijl]

I can confirm Steven on CentOS, if you want to go "free" (for example not with a fixed support contract) while still having a "RH"-compatible platform it's a nice alternative.

In terms of packaging, the Ubuntu/Debian world still is the joy of a lifetime. Whereas anything exotic on RH/SuSE usually requires compiling & building custom rpm's etc... Perhaps one can consider Ubuntu for large deployments with its new landscape tool: http://www.canonical.com/landscape

I haven't dealt with Ubuntu support yet, but I see them growing into the no. 3 competitor on commercially supported Linux's so can't be that bad. Since they are not on 1st or 2nd place yet, I presume their support prices can be "talked about" to be more competitive.

In the end, as Heironimus said, it all depends upon your applications & their requirements.

[Heironimus]

I guess I'll toss out another approval for CentOS. I haven't seen any problems using it to host products from Oracle and IBM that are certified on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. However, if we were to call for support they would just say "we don't support CentOS" and close the ticket. For a real system the cost of the Red Hat support contract is very small compared to the cost of the application licenses, but as long as you don't need official phone support it's a viable option for temporary test systems.