Red Hat refers to their licenses as subscriptions (since they're renewable annually I guess) in some cases. Perhaps they're trying to make it clear that you're not buying the software permanently, just licensing it. (That doesn't really ring true either, since you can continue to use the software after the license expires, you just can't use RHN to service it, and would have to remove the Red Hat trademarked RPMs.) Bottom line, it's the term they use for whatever reasons they have.
For the 7.x versions, Red Hat did distinguish between 31-bit and 64-bit. Since I can't see those channels for RHEL3, I can't say if that is still the case or not. The Red Hat website shows that support is included in the price of the package. You have the choice of Standard or Premium support, but you cannot choose "no support" that I can see. http://www.redhat.com/apps/commerce/rhel/as/ I can't really comment on the 25 images/IFL being low or not. Someone on the list just reported one instance using 95% of an IFL. I imagine they're not going to try to put 24 more of those on that same processor. :) If you're running a lot of light stuff, I guess 25 would be a little low, but if you break it down on a per-instance basis, and what you would pay for the Intel variant of RHEL3, it isn't that bad (less than half the cost per server). Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Ann Smith Sent: Thursday, July 15, 2004 5:23 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Which zSeries Linux Distributions and Why? What do you mean by a zSeries and s/390 'subscription' ? Is the subscription the license to run linux or the support contract? We run SuSE SLES8 (now Novell). The license and upgrade protection is by number of IFL engines. You also need to pay more to get both 31-bit and 64-bit. What RedHat's take on 31-bit and 64-bit? Separate subscriptions? The Novell support contacts are by number of 'incidents' you call in. I guess you need to know how many problems you are going to have. Mainline support contacts seem to be limited by number of linux guests (like RedHat). But the IBM support contract was unlimited guests (but more money if you do not have many guests). I got totally confused trying to pick a support contract. But if a 'subscription' is just the license then trying to determine if SuSE or RedHat was more cost effective would probably depend on the applications you are running-i.e., how many servers you can run on 1 IFL compared to RedHat's arbitrary 25 servers. The 'per subscription, per engine' leads one to believe people running RedHat are running piggier applications. But with the powerful IFL's on the z990, limiting to 25 still seems pretty low. What do you do with the rest of the IFL capacity? I guess run non-RedHat servers. Victor Strasser wrote: > Which zLinux distributions are you using, and why did you pick that > one? > > Also, can anyone explain what Red Hat was thinking when they wrote > "IBM zSeries & s/390 subscriptions include the ability to run and > support up 25 Enterprise Linux AS instances/images per subscription, > per engine"? IBM's current z/VM licensing scheme is great, and even in > the old "model group" days, they didn't care how many CMS virtual > machines I ran. > > Thank you, > Victor > > -- > ======================================================================= > Victor Strasser > Teale Data Center VM, Linux, & Teradata Support Unit Supervisor > E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] pers: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Phone: (916)464-4522 CalNet 8-433-4522 > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send > email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or > visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
