In my opinion, the biggest benefit of the Enterprise-class Red Hat Linux products is the long release cycle. Red Hat Linux is on a 6 month release cycle, with maintenance periods of one year. This means that after one year, there's no telling if there will be official security and bugfix updates for a particular version. You'll have to upgrade the distribution to keep up with fixes, which can be painful in some cases. The Enterprise Linux AS, ES, and WS products are on a 5 year cycle. This means that you won't be running the bleeding edge stuff, but you will have a supported platform with updates for at least 5 years from the release date. Add that to the features of the Red Hat Network, and you have a system that should be up to date and trouble-free for a long time. I'd recommend using the Enterprise Linux products for anything mission-critical if you can afford it.
-Tim On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 02:46, -ray wrote: > On Tue, 22 Jul 2003, Shannon Roddy wrote: > > > On another note... Anyone here using the "pay" versions of redhat? As > > in the Enterprise WS stuff? Or the Advanced Server stuff? If so, what > > do you think? Worth it? No? I have never bothered with it, but I > > might need to if they have superior management tools. I am getting more > > and more people around here running Linux and if it has tools that will > > make my life easier, I might look into it. besides, if it comes with a > > support contract, that might be nice... since googling doesn't work 100% > > of the time, though it seems to most of the time. > > We are using Advanced Server on our mail servers. Unless you want HA > clustering, it probably isn't worth it. Basically AS2.1 is RH7.2 with the > Oracle-enhanced enterprise kernel (AIO, big-O scheduler) and the cluster > package. The cluster package is neat. It is easy to setup > high-availability NFS, Samba, or Apache servers, or setup custom HA > services (like Sendmail). It also does IP address takeover. But unless > you have both systems connected to a SAN, i don't think it'd work very > well. AS only supports 2-node cluster... > > As far as "superior management tools", all you get is a few commands to > monitor the status of the cluster. That's it. Worth it? For the level > of support you get, i would say yes. I've used phone support a few times, > but can normally find solutions on google. Considering the amount of > money we send Microsoft, Novell, IBM, and Compay/HP to use/support their > OS's, i don't feel bad at all sending Redhat $3k/year for our two > servers. also considering almost half of all our servers are redhat... > > Also keep in mind you are only paying Redhat for services/support... the > software is still free in accordance with the GPL. All the AS2.1 src > rpm's are on redhat's ftp. You could get the kernel and clumanager rpms > and try them out. Let me know if you can get them to build... :) > > ray > > > > _______________________________________________ > General mailing list > [email protected] > http://brlug.net/mailman/listinfo/general_brlug.net
