How do you use RHEL?

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At Red Hat we're always interested in collaborating with our customers. Along those lines, I'm curious to learn more about how you're using RHEL. Is Red Hat Enterprise Linux a standard platform that all new work loads are deployed on by default? Is RHEL restricted to certain application loads only (database servers, mail servers, etc)? Are you migrating from another platform to RHEL?

 

What do you see as the main impediments to greater RHEL deployment? Some customers I work with have mentioned 3rd party software vendor certifications as an issue when deciding to deploy RHEL - particularly with the most recently released versions of RHEL. Are there other issues that inhibit greater adoption in your organization?

 

Let us know how you use our products and what your pain points are or your success stories. We'd love the feedback and the opportunity to discuss these things with our customers in the new Online User Groups!

 

Thanks,

Justin

Responses

Dear Justin,

 

 

At Getronics Datacenters, RHEL is just one of many Operating Systems.

 

The use spreads from webservers and mailservers to database servers and application server like JBoss.

 

We are partly customer driven and have some standard solutions.

 

 

Kind regards,

 

 

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

Hi Jan Gerrit,

 

Welcome to the Online User Groups!

 

Indeed, we definitely see a number of customers where RHEL is one of many OSes. What are some of the main factors that drive the choice of RHEL vs other options for your customers?

 

- Justin

Hi Justin,

 

 

You ask me what are the main factors that drive the choice for RHEL vs other options?

 

The main factor is a human factor: The preferences of our Architects and Consultants or the preferences of the customer himself/herself.

 

As a Red Hat Salesperson, and RHCE I would recommend RHEL above other Linux distros. (I am a highlevel SysAdmin)

 

One of our Architects is an ex-Red Hat employee so he will back my point of view. Some Architects and Consultants come from other OS backgrounds and have other preferences.

 

 

Kind regards,

 

 

Jan Gerrit

Right now, the effort is to replace legacy Solaris SPARC systems with commodity (or virtualized) RedHat-based systems. Oracle's complete and utter botch of handling their Sun ownership is driving this.

 

RHEL use is primarily on the infrastructure side of things, rather than desktops. There are some groups trying to get completely off *N*X and go to Windows - ironically, many such pushes come from people that were using Solaris previously. There seems to be this unexplainable reticence to make the fairly small jump from one *N*X to another. Fortunately, things like LikeWise are helping to keep that at bay and getting the *non* UNIX folks interested. VMware adoption helps, as well, because the people involved with virtualization that have worked with the ESX service console already have a level of comfort at the CLI.

 

My focus is primarily in the storage and integration arenas. But, because I have a multi-decade history across a number of UNIX platforms, I'm frequently tasked to "fill in the gaps" for those groups moving to Linux. This is both a good thing and a bad thing, as a number of tools/utilities/capabilities that I came to take for granted in OSes like Solaris, AIX and HP/UX, just "aren't quite there" in RedHat (particularly things supporting dynamic reconfiguration pieces). It really sometimes makes it seem that the "E" in RHEL should, instead, be an "e". I'll grant, however, that some of the things I'm trying to do are probably "edge-case use scenarios".

 

Still, in my having to figure out how to do the more  esoteric tasks in RedHat, it's given me an excuse to write a blog that traces my solutions (and the frustrations that led to them).

This is my main project. it's very slow due to many reasons, but so far so good. Business partners loved them (no often down time, and fast, reliable, etc.).

Additionally, we add more servers for web services also.

Hi Danny,

 

 

What is slow?

 

The Windows environment, the Linux environment or both?

 

 

Kind regards,

 

 

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

I think your previous post answered your question about "What is slow?".

Sorry Danny,

 

 

I was willing to help you in possibly solve your performance problem, but your answer is too criptic to me.

 

Are you refering to human errors or human percention?

 

 

Kind regards,

 

 

Jan Gerrit Kootstra

I took it to mean that the *adoption* (process) was slow, not that the OS, itself, was slow. 

[ this post has been moved here ]

Hi, I think RHEL will be good as webservers. As a system administrator, I'm not too familiar with the apps like MySQL, PHP etc. I'm more concerned with monitoring and more importantly, centralised monitoring. Eg. If there are multiple webservers, centralised monitoring of say, apache access logs and messages logs, will be useful. However, there's very little guidance on this aspect. Apache logs have to be rotated, redirected, excluded from messages file, sent off to another IP, farmed out to individual directories for separate webservers on the monitoring server then compressed etc. Unless I'm missing something, this would be a very desirable use of RHEL but sadly very lacking in KB articles or documentation. Moreover, folks seem to rely on free downloads to track web traffic eg. awstats. I'm puzzled as to why RedHat does not seem to provide the lot in a useable format within the distro with guidance on usage? It will, in my humble opinion, add a lot of value to the OS. If a supported powerful OS comes with all the tricks in the box for webservers and backed by sufficient documentation, it will be brilliant! As it is, one has to do various scripts, guess what format the existing scripts are in and try to modify them. It's a bit like being given a toolbox but no instructions on assembly. Ikea has the right idea, you get the tools AND the instructions and it works!

 

I need to configure Redhat Linux as Domain Controller in my organisation, where all of my clients PC's will be Windows XP or Windows 7 ( where i can login through Domain users ). what exactly i need to configure in Redhat Linux, i heard Configuring Samba as PDC is quite enough ? is that right ? then what is Open LDAP ? should i need to Configure Open LDAP also ?
 
Right now i have configured DNS, i am able to dig my server name. it's well resolving, bit i am unable to connect my XP Pc's as clients to the Server. while changing the name it is unable to contact the Server. { i tried the same process in Windows DC environment, joining clients to domain, where domain users can login to client PC's }
 
Can you please guide what exactly i need to configure ? What will the best Option ?
1. DNS or 2. Sambe or 3. Openldap ?
 
 
 
 
   

Hi Anantha,

 

to be honest, it's a bit more to do than just configure samba. You will also have to have a user management solution as you've already mentioned.

 

As I don't know anything about the number of users you will have or about the number of clients (XP / win7 systems) it's hard to suggest a solution. OpenLDAP as a start sounds like a good solution as it scales pretty well.

 

So, to put in a nutshell - you will have to have DNS, SAMBA and OpenLDAP configured in the correct way to get the solution working.

 

There is a very good howto available on the samba pages:

 

http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/man/Samba-HOWTO-Collection/samba-pdc.html

 

Kind regards

 

Marko

 

--

Marko Karg

Red Hat Technical Account Manager

Is there a particular reason why your clients are remainging on windows xp and windows 7? Running all Red Hat systems can prove to be much more simple and efficient. If you do you may take the Samba PDC completely out of the picture and just use Redhat Directory services for user managerment.

We're using RHEL to serve very high traffic websites; dynamic and static. Using nginx, apache, mysql and php.

Some servers are managed using whm/cpanel.

And we're almost the only company to use SELinux with Cpanel/WHM successfully.

We're targeting high traffic websites which needs rebust performance and reliability, and those who need complex solutions; like High Availaibilty , Content Delivery network, continues data protection and so.

We're also using it as a part of a custom high-effecient low-cost DDoS protection solution.

Also, we've started testing RHEL6 to be used for Cloud VPS hypervisors; using KVM.

Some of the systems are using CentOS, but we wish to move everything to RHEL soon, insha'Allah.

A single Rhel entry level server with a 2 x Quad processor and 10-20gb of ram easily supports up to 50 business users that run Gnome, Firefox, Thunderbird, Libreoffice and a SMB ERP. Clients can be Win/Lin Pc/Mac ( I saw even PII with 96mb of ram ) or even IPads. Their only requirement is to have a vnc viewer. This means you can reuse almost every Pc you have ever bought, greatly reducing support costs and free users from a specific workstation and a specific position since remote access is as easy as the local one. Not suitable for every environment but when appropiate it really saves money and time.

best regards,
LF

Are your users happy with VNC performance?  I can see a clear difference between local apps visualization and remote VNC session accessible thru even gigabit network. Using old equipment as a client should make visualization performance even worse.

Justin,

 

Great post.  I recently switched from Fedora 14 over to RHEL6.1 on my laptop.  I have been loving it.  Even though a lot of packages are not shipped by Red Hat, I am able to do everything I need from a working laptop to a personal one.  Thankfully, we have third party repos to assist in missing packages and codecs for a full online experience.

 

I haven't had any issues yet.

 

~rp

We use RHEL is serveral differnt ways:

 

- As our main server: DNS, DHCP, Data storage

- We have numerous VMs on VMWare as data collection, data servers, data processing systems

- We have numerous systems which are used as pppd servers, running up to 16 analog modems each.  These also do data forwarding.

- Webserver

- Mass data storeage, data server, data processor interconnected to all our pppd servers

 

RHEL has served us well, it has been stable and reliable until version 6 which wouldn't load on our servers because they use the XG1 video chips, then 6.1 which will load but still is unstable on XG1 video chips.

 

Looking forward to version 7.

 

-Sky

We use RHEL5.4 currently at customer sites as a client/server for Google Earth.  The customer has Solaris workstations and we remotely display Google Earth to those workstations.

 

This is the only use for it right now, as the customer has no inclination to move to a non-Solaris workstation

While there is some RHEL infrastructure that use only what comes certified and updated by Red Hat product management and support services (possibly a Fedora EPEL package or two), the main growth in my consulting and migration experience has been in the ISV sphere.  People use applications, so ISVs, what they support, what they say is king.  Especially when it comes to ISVs who have more and customers asking them to move them from Solaris and even Windows.

 

Now there are definitely issues with ISVs not being on-board with Update Betas (e.g., 5.7 Beta, 6.2 Beta, etc...), and then taking months after release to actually start certification for X.Y.  And by the time they are ready formall test certify X.Y, X.Y+1 is already out..  Red Hat should interact with ISVs, both major and minor, and not only get them on-board with Red Hat's lifecycle, but ask them where their pain points are.

 

Furthermore, if they really don't want to be supporting the latest X.Y, someone needs to get in there and education them having their customers purchase Extended Update Support (EUS) entitlements.  That way they can keep their customers on X.Y-1 or even X.Y-2 (1 year back) when X.Y is the latest, and there are no security issues, because the customer has EUS.  The upside for Red Hat that more customers are paying for EUS (increased revenue), while the costs in the sustainment engineering of EUS is still a fixed price (same, existing expense).

 

I really think EUS is not sold well enough to customers -- especially smaller customers and non-major ISVs.  One way to do that is to bring all of the ISVs into the fold, big and small.  ISVs are probably the best avenue to selling EUS entitlements, especially since EUS solves so many ISV certification issues.

We use RHEL storing the DB for our SMB ERP (a few months ago it was stored in a Win Server). We are using Nagios for monitoring, under Ubuntu server, but we'll be migrating this to RHEL soon.

Now I'm trying building up a RHEL PDC and replace our Windows PDC. I'm absolutely pro Linux (Redhat of course).

Regarding to migrate our Win PDC to RHEL PDC, I know it could be made with Samba + DNS + OpenLDAP, but there is the option to use RH Directory Server for users management. What is the difference? RHDS support XP clients?

I've no choice to change our XP clients by now because our ERP runs under XP.

Suggestions about RHDS vs SAMBA+DNS+OpenLDAP? We have 50 network clients.

We are using RHEL for production environmemnt in TelCo networks, basically any application you imagine there (mediation devices/charging, authentication infrastructure, AAA services, Management systems, application platforms in IMS and around it) Hardware is basically all x86_64, HP blades, Sun/oracle Netra, IBM blades, .... With SAN or without, ... Typical server has 2-4 recent proecessors, 16-32GB RAM, 1 or sometimes 2 4-NIC ethernet, uses some bonding/VLANs and runs either RHCS or "plain"corosync/pacemaker HA. Resource agents are 40% homebrew or 60% "off-the-shelf"" RedHat, sometimes they need little adaptation.

The fact that DRBD support has to be purchased extra from LinBit is a pain in the back, because in large companies it is a big formal act to introduce a new "partner" and LinBit - as good as they might be for what they do - does just not offer a wide enough portfolio for our legal and procurrement people to take a look at them.... So as soon as we need DRBD we are "naked" when it comes to support, that is a shame and an issue where RedHat support could clearly improve! We'd like to get all out of one contract rather than have to legally involve 2 comanies when selling a system with commercial support backup!

 

There is little competition! I saw some of our product lines/labs coming up with solaris but after the oracle-merge they all came to redhat, nobody went to oracle linux or suse, dont ask me why. In our company (major TelCo supplier) RHEL is "standard" for COTS hardware - it's cheap and good. The wide support and community you get on EPEL type linux is encouraging. As a "small and independent unit" inside our big company, we can "just define our platform as we need it" on RedHat and even get a commercial support. Only our larger units are developing/adapting own linux branches based on BSD, but then they are be able to come up with an own support (i.e. no real backup from an external community, at leats not commercially) and this only makes sense if the HW is also exotic (i.e. our own ATCA boxes etc go on a housemade linux) When we need to run commercial 3rd party SW in a single-function box, we normally use RedHat. FOr example: Your IMS system might be "proprietary" Linux and own blades, peripheric boxes like AAA or charging gateways are probably RHEL on regular rackmount servers.

Virtualisation is not a topic at the moment, we are rarely asked for it. TelCos still seem to be OK with huge power bills and floorspace footproint. They're quite conservative with that and feel more comfortable if they can map one function to one physical box that is screwed somewhere, rather than going around and look for errors in the clouds ...

I think the ISP space is increasingly moving into virtualisation at the moment, the main driving factor being the increasing expense of datacentre space. This results in the need to make the space worth as much as possible for its outlay, both from providers of rackspace who are taking up IaaS/PaaS as an addition to their physical space offerings, as well as direct consumers of that physical space.

 

The catalyst for this was probably the ISP market's friends in the closely-related web market, with extremely interesting concepts like Google's ubiquitous "datacentre in a shipping container", Intel's aircon-free open-to-the-outdoors datacentre, and Facebook's Open Compute Project.

 

Now while the ISP market gets comfy with virt, the web space has moved into cloud. Virt has spread from web to ISP to datacentre, the telco space seems the next logical leap to me!

Hello everyone,

First time comment.
I have been using Red Hat OS's since EL 2.1 I believe in 2002.

I cut my teeth on Solaris.

As far as the flavors of Linux , Red Hat is my personal favorite.
BSD as well.

The others are trying to mimic windows as far as I'm concerned.

Red Hat does try to play both sides of the fence.
They are trying to make CLI folks comfortable as well as Windows folks.
Whatever you prefer ...

I myself manage servers for US Fed Gov't Health and Human Service.

Its no secret we use RHEL 5 & 6.

I am finding however with vm's in a hosted situation, the cloud is only for small server requirements.

We are now moving BACK to bare metal servers.
Full circle.

Anyway, RHEL 5 is pretty stable.

I am finding some quirks with 6.

I recently tried 7 but the subscription part COMPLETELY pisses me off.

What POS that is.

That's my assessment of RHEL servers.

Hi Chris. Welcome, and thanks for reviving this thread. Sorry you were frustrated with RHEL 7. Can you provide some more details about the issues you had with Subscription Management?

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