Wunk said:
Start supporting both Fedora as RHES..
I presume you mean "Fedora
and RHES".
Fedora for the people who just want a working server with a good and not too costy controlpanel..
Supporting Fedora will require a lot of resources; it's a moving target, and if the Fedora team meets it's goals, there will be several major releases a year. Think of making the changes necessary for CR1 today, and in six months having to make changes again for CR2. Think of making changes every four to six months for a release with a total lifetime of less than a year.
I surely hope that DA doesn't fall into the trap of trying to keep DA working with a moving target such as Fedora.
RHES 3.0 WS for the people who want a bit more security considering updates and support, WS isn't too expensive anyways, but will come with 5 year worth of updates
RHES comes with a yearly subscription; you pay the full price every year of those five years. The Basic (download) version will cost $900 over those five years. If you've got 50 systems in a cabinet that's $9,000 each year.
If you want the package and/or the 24/7 Web Support and 12/5 phone support (in the US, 8/5 in the rest of the world), that's an extra $120 per year per license, $1500 over those five years, or $15,000 each year for a cabinet full of systems. (Yes, I know you can't get 50 systems in a cabinet; I'm just rounding for easy "in-my-head" math.)
And for those fees the 24/7 web support response time is two business days and the phone response time is 4 hours.
But better not get that support anyway, since it won't cover you. WS is a workstation edition; I expect they won't want to support any issues at all in a server environment.
To get the minimal server edition (ES), we're talking $350/year, $1,750 over five years; you can do the math yourself if you've got more than a few servers.
But on this you might want to pay $800/year ($4,000 over five years) since the support will cover your use as a server.
Shouldn't be too much of a hassle to make it work, since it's all very Redhat 9 oriented..
Funny you should point that out. In fact it's almost exactly RHL9. The major difference being they're promising to not change it for a few years.
Don't even think of upgrading packages yourself outside of their upgrade system, say to a later version of GD, or else the support is worthless.
Whoops... did I say that? I did. That means their five years of stability become close to worthless since the DA install will kill the important (to us hosters) RPMs RH installs and supports, and install their own, totally unsupported by RH.
Sure RHEL may give you some warm and fuzzies but do you really get any more than that for all your money? I did the research, I did the math, I spent hours on the phone with their sales reps (that happens when you have a lot of systems you're going to stop subscribing to RHN for), and I don't think so. YMMV of course.
The best solution so far appears to be either WBEL (White Box Extended Linux) compiled from RHEL source minus the copyrights and the relatively worthless support, and FreeBSD.
Consider the relative ages and maturities of the two, and what that means for continued availability of upgrades, I think FreeBSD to be the better bet.
I'll support DA on anything, but I see what I see; that's my story and I'm sticking to it
.
Jeff
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