What is the typical turn around for HP supporting a new RHEL release

[Adam Garsha]

I am wondering how long until RHEL 6 drivers, etc. will see sunshine. E.g. HP blessed nic drivers and SAS hba drivers, etc.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

Red Hat usually builds in hardware support for currently sold hardware.

As far as PSP goes and all the toys, that takes 60-90 days. I've seen it take as long as 180 days.

I would also caution that I've already blown up a couple of vm install attempts. It was quite the flame out. I won't be thinking about RHEL6 in production for a year, eg two updates.

SEP

[Adam Garsha]

Good info. Yeah, we'll be testing it soon, but I've got some super long implementations ahead and I am thinking it might be good to start at 6 or at least start playing with it if early evidence aligns with your findings.

Curious, VM's in VMWare or Redhat style VM's?

[Alzhy]

Dunno what you mean by "Blessed" but RHEL releases are no longer dependent on Individual Vendor's drivers bos as practicvally all of the planet's NICs, HBAs, controllers aer alerady officially supported under RHEL releases. I've yet to encounter *really* needing vendor drivers at all - all the Qlogics, EMulii, MPTs SASes,Broadcoms, INTELs, etc are in the Kernel.

If you mean however stuff like PSP bunled products and HPDM(no longer needed really) - I'd say 30 to 45 days.

I have been running RHEL 6 since it was Beta 3 or something on very recent HP Proliant HW (G7s even) and have had no problems for physicals, RHEL on vMware and RHEL on RHEL (KVM). The TCP/IP stack (Google?) is just awesome. CLustering improvements in COnga too. KVM Virtual Machines can now be a managed VM "service" under Conga/RHCS.

[Adam Garsha]

By "blessed" I meant the ones that HP CS folks would say are ok if we have an issue. We don't worry too much about drivers and yes it will always work out of the box, but with the Flex-10 nic stuff and c-class enclosures, HP support folks are always pushing the HP bundled version of the driver (and we've seen weird stuff in rhel 5 when not using the specific driver with the specific fw, etc as recommended by HP); For SAN, though we use in-box and are happy campers. We do use HP's recommended DM conf though.

Yeah, rhel 6 has the built in automatic big page stuff too and I could see that being a big win for oracle db systems.

Say, did you'all notice Itanium support gone? Not that I would ever do that, but I thought it was interesting since I remember seeing so many superdome slideshows back in the day that would advertise hp-ux/windows/linux all in the same frame. Just hp-ux now I guess.

[Alzhy]

Flex -- yep, HP always would want them drivers. We're good though as we run vMware on them new G6 blades (No Linux RHEV/KVM yet -- lotsa Fiefdom influence in my org...)

Yes probly missed some of my posts where in I mentioned HP is the Last Itanium Man Standing. Along with Microsoft, Redhat announced a few months ago that RHEL 5.X will be the LAST version for IA-64 as all its energies will be focused on X86_64 sir.


Just picked up the non-Beta RHEL6 from RHN and did my SwingBench and other BEnchmarks - and Boy do the numbers fly! The new TCP/IP stack (from Google?) really makes the new more current RHEL 6 a likely quick migration for us soon.

[Adam Garsha]

Yeah, we've got VMware too, but have been cowards to run any Oracle in there because of their big-pain-in-butt support language. So we've got a good deal of RHEL on physical. I'd note we've been chasing some flex-10 nic issues with VMWare on G6 (but I understand that they may have a good driver version now to fix the sporadic issue).

I wish we could shove all our stuff in VMWare to be frank. Makes administration so much easier from OS and support matrix perspective. Now if only 3rd party vendors could cut the crud.

[Wolfram Jarisch]

more specifically - you think this does also apply to software like hplip?

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom again Adam,

Say, did you'all notice Itanium support gone?

RH announced they were dropping IA64 support six or so months ago. Microsoft said that Server 2008 will be their last IA64/Itanium release about the same time frame.

Many of the special features of Itanium/2 are finding their way into regular Intel chips these days.

sEP

[Alzhy]

Ye just noticed oh "great" one?

I've been posting it all over in a crusade and warning that X86 "SmartIrons" are here and that Both Microsoft and Redhat are at their last releases for the Itanic platform.

HP - the last Itanium Man Standing.