[Ocfs2-users] Best Linux distribution for OCFS2?

[Lars Marowsky-Bree]

On 2010-04-15T10:34:52, "Patrick J. LoPresti" <lopresti at gmail.com> wrote:

> My current short list of options reads:
> 
>   Ubuntu Lucid Lynx
>   Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11
>   OpenSuse 11.2 or 11.3

Marketing on (hey, you _did_ ask!) -

Like others have pointed out, SLES 11 does not include OCFS2 in the base
product; you need an additional subscription for the SLE
High-Availability extension. (Note its not the same as a license.
Important distinction in the free software world ;-)

The list price for the extension is $699 I believe; however, that
includes more than just the maintenance updates, but will actually
upgrade your support contract for SLES to cover the HA extension too.

Without sounding too much like a marketing drone, I'd very much
recommend that an HA environment is purchased together with support. If
you're going to be supporting this for years, it sounds like a business
environment, and a business HA environment tends to, by definition, be
mission-critical. If it weren't, people wouldn't be investigating HA for
it.

So, to be fair, the list price for SLE HA needs to be compared with the
relevant support and testing cost for Ubuntu/openSUSE to get the full
cost. (Unless you have the staff internally to support all the
components; in which case you wouldn't be asking ;-)

openSUSE has fairly aggressive release cycles and perhaps won't get the
updates you need; and won't be receiving maintenance for "years" - if
you need, say, 3-10 years, SLE HA is probably the best choice.

It should also be obvious that an enterprise-distribution gets more
integration, QA and testing on top of the community distributions.

When you report an iSCSI/md/OCFS2 bug to Novell as a paying customer, we
have a bunch of OCFS2 maintainers and developers on staff to drop
whatever they were doing and rush to it. Also the OCFS2 integration on
SLE HA 11 is quite well tested, and it's Novell's primary cluster file
system. Mark did quite a bit of debugging and performance upgrades
there.

We release periodic maintenance updates fixing bugs, and the upcoming
SP1 release includes a fully tested refresh with all the latest OCFS2
bits.

Ubuntu HA is fairly new. I'm not aware of how much experience they've
got with shipping products/supporting HA environments. Looking at the
contributions the community gets from Oracle, Red Hat, SuSE et al,
Ubuntu contributors are not on the list.

This is not meant as a dismissal; it may be Ubuntu is right for you. But
from the list of the three distributions, only one of them has a 10 year
history of shipping cluster solutions and enterprise support.

And, of course, it allows me to buy food. I really like food. ;-)


Regards,
    Lars

-- 
Architect Storage/HA, OPS Engineering, Novell, Inc.
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)
"Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes." -- Oscar Wilde