Re: Which Linux for Oracle 9i on AMD Opteron?

What are you basing this on? I have seen the exact opposite from my personal experience. I am much more comfortable with SuSE's support than Red Hat's. Just one example, I recently contacted SuSE support regarding a POSIX standard that their syslogd daemon isn't adhering too. I was contacted a few days later by someone wanting more information to compile into a feature request and he claims it will be fixed in a future update. That person then referred me to syslog-ng and even gave me a sample config that would work-around the issue with syslogd) I find that level of support better than even Sun and IBM. (of yea, and this type of support request wasn't even covered under our support umbrella but yet they gave me support anyway)

Not only that, 2 developers at oracle that I know tell me 'off the record' that oracle is more stable on SuSE than on Red Hat. (and I was told this at a time before Novell aquired them. SuSE has only gotten more rock solid since then) Albeit, that statement is about 4 years old now but I doubt their opinion has changed.

I'll admit, that prior to Novell, SuSE support was bad. (well the company itself was counting pennies at one point, and they were trying to sell the company to just about anyone that would listen) But give Novell a few more years and I believe they will take SuSE to the top of the Linux food chain. (hint: buy Novell stock now)

I'm not bashing Red Hat, I have used it extensively since the first version was made publicly available. i'm just saying that from my experience over the past 7 years or so, SuSE has been more reliable and less problematic for the IT shops I have worked in. This is including a few data centers where I had systems that were very heavily loaded and really put Linux to the test.

I would love to hear about sample support engagements other people have had from RH or SuSE. I find that quality of support is often the deciding factor on which vendor I go with. (not just operating systems, all software and hardware in general) Support concerns are one of the few hurdles slowing Linux growth at the moment. (well I wouldn't call Linux growth slow, maybe I mean growth would be much faster if support was less of a concern)

We have project plans in place where I am at now to replace all of our big iron Sun systems with AMD64 systems running SLES9 by Q3 of this year. The only systems we aren't braving on Linux yet are our core NFS servers (serving about 12TB of data). (and once I'm comfortable with the new scheduler in the 2.6 kernel, those will be migrated as well) Received on Fri Mar 04 2005 - 16:00:56 CST