Re: RHAS vs. SLES

On Fri, 25 Apr 2003, Kenneth A Kauffman <kkauffman_at_nospam.headfog.com> wrote:
> Has anyone done comparisons of RedHat Advanced Server and Suse Linux
> Enterprise Server (or United Linux)? I'm interested in actual experiences
> with installation, overall administration and performance of related
> systems.

I recently chose SLES over RHAS, but part of that is that I've used SuSE Pro for years. I am a lot more familiar with SuSE, so keep that in mind. Hopefully you'll get some pro-RHAS opinions to balance it out.

Having said that, I do think RHAS is badly out of date. SLES8/UL1.0 is a very fresh release, and very solid.

A few points:
- RH seems to have stayed with relatively older kernels, and deal with bugs and driver updates based from there. SLES tends to keep up with the new stock kernels, plus SuSE modifications. RH is a more conservative approach, but the downside is that you have to find and add drivers for newer hardware during the installation.

• I like yast. It is a comprehensive admin tool. Not perfect, but good. I especially like that I can use it as a GUI or CLI. (SLES7 was transitional between the older yast1 and newer yast2; SLES8's yast is a lot smoother.)

The RH admin tools seemed more haphazard. I would have likely just ignored them and edited the files directly, after learning the RH ways of doing things like network initialization.

• SuSE has built-in support for LVM. This was an essential for me, as I don't want to get into third-party LVM products. The machines I'm targeting have hardware RAID (so the software mirroring tools are of no interest) but LVM is essential to managing volumes on top of the mirrored or RAID5 drives.

(RHAS doesn't have LVM, and isn't friendly to you using it in their kernel.)

• SuSE's email list support, though free, is excellent. The suse-oracle list is very good, with people even asking questions about RHAS on it. The techs on the other end are very responsive. I never used RH's lists, so can't compare.
• RHAS includes more phone support in the base packages, iirc. SuSE has two separate deals -- maintenance program and their support contracts. Maintenance is for software updates, support contract is for 24x7 telephone support.
• The RH update network seemed more professionally done than SuSE's, but SuSE's is functional and reliable, just not as spiffy.
• Redhat included cluster technology, with a hardcopy manual about it. Manual looked good, but I never checked into how well the clustering worked. Under SuSE, they provide the basic components for a heartbeat failover cluster, and the ldirectord stuff from Linux Virtual Server. I'm using heartbeat for Apache stuff, and it was easy to set up.
• SLES7 had some rough admin spots (yast) but is very reliable. I used it first for Oracle systems before SLES8 came along. SLES8 (aka UnitedLinux 1.0 + SLES) is very very good.

-- 

Leach