[nflug] Red Hat vs. SUSE on Servers

Darin Perusich Darin.Perusich at cognigencorp.com
Wed Jun 13 13:24:01 EDT 2007


I migrated ALL of Cognigen's RedHat/BSD and a number of Solaris systems 
to SuSE Linux 4 or 5 years ago and I still feel it was a very good decision.

Initially the main catalyst for this move was RedHat dropping the 
"RedHat Linux" line in favor of their Enterprise line for customers and 
making Fedora the community disto. RedHat stated that Fedora was their 
"test bed" for moving things into RHEL which to me meant it's all 
bleeding edge vaporware which I don't want in my computer center. I also 
wasn't a fan with the lack of packages that shipped with RedHat at the 
time, my time can be better spent then build software from source. 
System upgrades then were a shot in the dark! You were better off nuking 
the existing installation and recreating the system, which is a  huge 
waste of time. Management tools for RedHat are have always been 
inconsistent IMHO, it's either some GUI app or vi'ing files from the 
command line.

SuSE is the #2 distro in the US and #1 in Europe and shortly thereafter 
Novell purchased them. Say what you will about Novell but the SuSE 
acquisition was huge and really opened up many doors for both companies 
that may have taken years to garner. Global support, sales, deep 
pockets, existing relationships with established companies like Oracle, 
IBM, etc.

SuSE was the first distro that I'd ever used where every package I 
needed was part of the distribution and they provide patches as well. If 
something wasn't available, very rare, I could usually find them in 
another repository or I could easily setup my own. From desktop to 
servers it's available and very up to date.

With the exception of Debian, SuSE was the first *NIX where upgrading 
from version to version has been flawless. I can jump from SuSE 9.0 to 
10.2 and not have to be concerned about things breaking. I preform 
server upgrades in under 30 minutes now instead of a day or two.

While vi will always be a close friend, 'yast' is now my best friend for 
managing SuSE servers. Whether I'm on a console or a full desktop the 
'yast' interface is the same and it touches nearly everything I need it 
to. I will say that SuSEconfig took a little while to get use to but now 
it's second nature. When you modify files in /etc/sysconfig you run 
SuSEconfig and it modifies/creates various configuration files.

The Novell/M$/whoever partnership will give businesses the warm fuzzes 
but I could care less. When this was being crafted I don't believe the 
"business" people at Novell got any or much feedback from the SuSE side 
of the house, all one need to do is look at the SuSE people who left. It 
certainly hasn't pushed me away from SuSE and it's not going to, I 
prefer to rely on SuSE for it's technical merits.

That was a mouthful!

Jesse Jarzynka wrote:
> Last night I talked to Dave for a while getting his opinions on
> administering Red Hat and SUSE in the enterprise realm. I wanted to get
> everyone else's opinions as well. This is for a presentation/training I'm
> doing on Linux here at Ingram. If anyone has any thoughts or experience
> with the two distros in the enterprise please let me know. Some areas of
> concern are:
> 
> Which do you prefer and why?
> Any benefits you feel one has over the other.
> Do you feel SUSE is growing at all compared to Red Hat?
> Do you think Novell's Microsoft deal will inspire more companies to adopt
> for interoperability and safety or are companies less likely to use it
> since it is kind of against the spirit of the GPL and Open Source in
> general?
> Other distros you feel are growing (CentOS/Ubuntu) etc.
> 
> Any input is greatly appreciated. -Jesse
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-- 
Darin Perusich
Unix Systems Administrator
Cognigen Corporation
395 Youngs Rd.
Williamsville, NY 14221
Phone: 716-633-3463
Email: darinper at cognigencorp.com


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