[TriLUG] where to go from RH9?

[Ron Joffe]

On Wednesday 11 February 2004 12:00, Christopher L Merrill wrote:
> Any thoughts about which direction we should go?
Chris,

I would have to strongly suggest SuSE's Enterprise class of products. I have 
been using the SLES (SuSE Enterprise) for a three years at a half dozen 
production sites each utilizing from 2 to 5 servers, and at my own offices.

These sites are a number of electric utilities which utilize these servers for 
the outage restoration applications. This is a basis for their entire 
operations department on a day to day basis, and compromises a critical 
infrastructure component for these utilities. Simply put, outage restoration 
is the process of getting your power back out once it has gone out (due to an 
ice storm for example :) )

We utilize a combination of custom written software, Oracle production 
databases, and a bunch of the regular utilities such as mail, bind, snmp, 
etc. 

The main reason for choosing SLES over RHAS had to do with the support that 
was available for our Oracle databases. These install and configuration of 
these databases can be very complex, and SLES provided (and still does 
provide) much better support the RHAS. 

In addition I do prefer the methodology that SuSE utilizes for administration, 
and package maintenance, although that is a matter of choice, but in a 
production environment seems to be the best for me. My background in the old 
Unises (SunOS, AIX, Tru64, HPUX) made me feel more comfortable in SuSE then 
in RedHat.

I have had experience with the exact same software utilizing RHAS 2.1. 
Although I normally highly recommend to my customers to utilize SLES, this 
one customer required us to run our software on a RHAS platform due to 
standardization within the compnay. I agreed completely with their decision 
to utilize a "standard" within their company.

Although, in retrospect, I should have tried harder to convince them to switch 
to SLES as their standard. At the time the big issues we had were with 
hardware drivers (Broadcom nics come to mind), and the lack of LVM and Reiser 
Filesystem support in RHAS 2.1. Both of those issues have come back to bite 
us hard. To be frank, the software components work exactly the same on both 
RHAS and SLES, and I know that RHAS 3.0 does have LVM support.

These are my opinions, and if you would like more details, let me know, and I 
can provide them.

Ron