Dell does have experience... and contracts... with RH for RHEL. They do
not recognize CentOS officially.
Rahul Nabar wrote:
On Mon, Apr 6, 2009 at 7:46 AM, Chris Samuel <csam...@vpac.org> wrote:
Even though we could reproduce it on 64-bit Debian
and 32-bit CentOS they wouldn't escalate the issue
until we could reproduce it on RHEL5 - which we did
today.
Thanks for sharing the anecdote Chris. I wonder if there is any clause
in the contracts restricting us to run certain OS's.
Dell have told us they won't support us or accept reports of problems
running anything but RHEL on our cluster. We therefore have one admin
who has been brainwashed into believing RHEL is actually spelled
"CentOS". He calls in hardware problems and can tell them we're running
what he believes is RHEL...
So long as we are using a "reputable" well-tested OS I find it unfair
that the vendors engage in so much arm-twisting. Is there any
scientific evidence that the core kernels of Debian or Fedora or CenOS
(that *is* essentially RHEL isn't it?) are any less reliable then
RHEL? What is / are the distros of choice on the Beowulf community?
Just getting a feel.
I tend to run CentOS. I also tend to upgrade packages on my cluster no
more frequently than annually. But that's often too frequent, so once
every two years or so would seem closer to accurate. After I get it
working, I want the compute nodes stable, not necessarily current.
I have tried out cutting edge distros meant for scientific
applications like ScientificLinux or ComputeNodeLinux but I've found
it more practical to stick to a larger, well used distro. No doubt I
might take some performance cuts on the benchmarks but the simple
reality of a larger user community out there makes it easier to debug
stuff and get well-tested apps and code that will run on my Distro
out-of-the box.
SL isn't much different from CentOS save a couple of extra packages that
make its core users' lives a little less interesting after initial
install by putting things in place they're most likely to need.
Otherwise, they look a lot like CentOS or any other stable Enterprise
environment.
gerry
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