On 18 Sep 2009, at 1:15 pm, Robert G. Brown wrote:
On Thu, 17 Sep 2009, Gerry Creager wrote:
I was a dyed-in-the-wool vmware user until quite recently, too,
but the pain of keeping it running on "current" distros (read:
Fedora) finally forced me to look elsewhere. I think you'll be
pleasantly surprised by VirtualBox if you give it a shot.
Then again, who knows what Oracle will do with it...
I'm not sure I'd TRY to keep it running on Fedora. Too bleeding
edge for my clusters!
I don't use Fedora on clusters, I use it on laptops, where bleeding
edge
is often necessary. I just got and reinstalled a Studio 17 Dell
(which
came with VoEvil, of course) and it wouldn't even boot the F10 install
image (at least not without a lot more energy than I had to put into
it). F11 it booted, and installed, flawlessly. From what Google
turned
up, Ubuntu will work too.
Ah, OK, so I can understand the VMware pain from that side. But the
pain we were talking about was maintaining old OS services for a long
time, and of course that's hopefully less difficult; as long as VMware
don't change the virtual hardware too much, we should be fine (and so
far they've been very good at maintaining backward compatibility).
I still take the point (that someone made, sorry I don't remember who)
that there may still be licensing issues for services built on
proprietary operating systems and such, but in my view that's a good
argument for building such services on open source software in the
first place. "Doctor, it hurts when I poke this sharp stick in my
eye"... :-)
The VMware hassle on F11 (and Ubuntu -- actually on current-gen
kernels
in general) has been the exception rather than the rule and seems to
be
due to a surprising lag between recent major changes in some of the
kernel sources, plus the shift in Fedora from OSS to ALSA-only with
OSS
emulation a deprecated, difficult to restore option. But I will try
VBox at my next reasonable opportunity.
On servers I run Centos or RHEL (licenses and all) as the vendor of
the
software requires. Generally Centos on top, then VMware, then RHEL
VMs.
Works fine. The only bad thing I've seen about Centos in the past is
the dark side of a long term freeze -- some very useful tools and
libraries have been in rapid development (notably the GSL and Yum).
RHEL 4 just sucked in this regard, with up2date instead of yum, and an
early, broken version of the GSL. Fedora is too fast, RHEL too slow.
What can you do?
I'm not sure there's any perfect answer to that one. The Debian
family of distros have a similar problem. Debian stable changes too
slowly, testing is too fast. Ubuntu seem to have a reasonable
compromise; two updates a year if you want bleeding edge, and LTS
releases every so often for those for whom stability is everything.
The only problem with the debian family, of course, is struggles with
ISV support, although that is coming, slowly. VMware now fully
support Debian as well as Ubuntu as ESX guests, which has made my life
much easier. They don't seem to support CentOS, but I just lie to
VMware and tell it the machine is running Red Hat, and it seems to
behave fine.
Our solution at Sanger to the stable vs uptodate argument has
basically been to go with Debian stable, and maintain our own
repository of backported packages for when we need something more
recent. Fortunately the number of packages we've had to backport or
patch has been fairly small.
Regards,
Tim
--
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
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