On Wed, Sep 30, 2015 at 09:03:48PM +0200, Rainer Duffner wrote: > > > Am 30.09.2015 um 16:25 schrieb Jeff Palmer <[email protected]>: > > > > Arnall, > > > > > > This advice is less of an haproxy specific response, and more of > > general information. > > > > As someone who's tried to manage mixed infrastructure, I would push > > back if possible, unles syour organization has decided to move to > > freebsd entirely. > > > > > Very few do that. > FreeBSD fulfills its purposes, though. > Even if you try to standardize on one ???flavor??? of Linux, you will still > end up with other flavors - simply because not everything runs on your > particular flavor. > And you???re not going to run all of your applications on all of your > platforms anyway. So the QA-effort should be manageable. > But that doesn???t mean it???s wise to introduce a half dozen different > platforms, either - unless you have enough people to handle all of it. > > How many systems (with Debian) are we talking about anyway? > And how many HA-Proxies are supposed to be migrated? > > What are the sysadmin???s technical points for moving? > Besides probably not wanting to deal with Debian???s head-ache-inducing idea > of an OS - that???s a given ;-) > > Unless OP is doing some *really fancy stuff*, there???s IMO no pure technical > show-stopper for a switch.
I'd be tempted to place my judgement between yours and Jeff's. I'd say that if the company is already using the target OS on any other place, the cost of switching is low. If the load balancer is the opportunity to introduce a new OS, it's a bad idea. By nature a load balancer is very OS-dependant, and has bugs. Sometimes it's not trivial to tell if a bug is in haproxy or the underlying OS until you get network traces and/or strace output (BTW as far as I know, strace still doesn't support amd64 on FreeBSD). Mixing the two can cast a bad image on the new OS just because admins will initially not know well how to tune it for the load and to ensure stability, will not easily troubleshoot tricky issues, and a lot of frustration will result from this. You should expect roughly the same performance on both OS so that is not a consideration for switching or not switching. Really keep in mind the admin cost, the cost of it being the exception in all your system and possibly different debugging tools. It's very likely that it will not be a problem, but better be aware of this. Willy
