Recovery, patching and upgrades
I work for a company in the midrange group. We run mostly IBM AIX systems with a few RedHat systems. The challenges I have with Linux is mostly around recovery (including bare metal), patching, and upgrading. There are many features that we have in AIX that are taken for granted.
mksysb – creates images backups of the OS while it's running. This is used for recovery and cloning.
multibos - makes a copy of the OS partitions (hd5,/,/usr/var and /opt) on disk, allows us to patch the copy. This allows us to fail back to the previous state by rebooting back to the old OS copy. This is included in AIX, Solaris (Live upgrades)... this feature is missing in Linux and Windows.
Patch sets (example service packets or bundles) - A couple reasons this is important to us.
- In AIX it's very important to keep patch sets. This is important for the NIM server. In AIX we us NIM to do package base installs, image recovery and boot into maintenance mode over the network.
2. This would allow application to be test against different levels of patches. What happens now is we patch test with one set of patches as of Date X. We go to patch production a week later and newer patches come out. I know there is Redhat Satellite but that is an add-on product.
These recommendations would help Linux mature to the next level.
