Groups | Search | Server Info | Keyboard shortcuts | Login | Register [http] [https] [nntp] [nntps]

Groups > comp.os.linux.misc > #1816

Re: Best practice Linux support vendors?

Show key headers only | View raw

On Fri, 15 Jul 2011 10:17:44 -0700, snorble wrote:

> On Jul 14, 2:36 am, Tim Watts <t...@dionic.net> wrote:
>> snorble wrote:
>> > When administering Windows servers, I have found that between the
>> > hardware vendor support (Dell, HP, etc) and Microsoft support, that
>> > takes care of most of the big "oh crap" situations, like having to
>> > restore a domain controller on different hardware or other hairy
>> > issues.
>>
>> > For Linux, the hardware vendor part stays the same. Dell replaces the
>> > parts regardless of OS. What about Linux support from vendors? I
>> > believe Dell has some offerings, and there's RedHat, etc. I use Linux
>> > for my own stuff, but for a customer it would be nice to have someone
>> > to call in a pinch. Any advice in this area? Thanks.
>>
>> From my personal experience, it has usually not been necessary - we've
>> always had enough expertice and autoation to be able to restore any
>> given system from backups onto new hardware in about 1/2 day (excepting
>> very large filestores where the time to physically restore the data
>> takes a day+ in itself).
>>
>> 1) The first rule is make sure your backups work (rsync based disk-disk
>> means you can afford to run incremental backups often, sometimes
>> multiple times per day - or look at filesystem snapshots in addition to
>> real backups)
>>
>> 2) Understand your deployments in detail and practise
>> restore-from-backup as part of deployment;
>>
>> 3) Have configuration management covering every config file;
>>
>> 4) Have critical services replicated where possible - certainly DNS,
>> kerberos, LDAP. Postgresql 9 also makes that possible for RDBMS.
>>
>> If you still want vendor support, it's quite understandable to want to
>> do so - given RedHat a call. Thye have a variety of support levels and
>> response times. I have no experience, but that's where I'd start if I
>> were going down that route. RedHat is not my personal favourite linux
>> (I much prefer Debian) but RedHat is pretty stable, pretty conservative
>> and seems to pretty much stay working.
>>
>> You will want to be careful to do things "their way" and not make your
>> systems too weird or offbeat for best effect.
>>
>> It's also worth mentioning, that for certain application software, eg
>> MySQL or Postgresql you may be able to further contract specialist
>> support for that from another vendor.
>>
>> Also, for RedHat - you can put your most critical stuff on contract and
>> use CentOS (which is a RHEL recompile and free) on the less critical
>> stuff and save money on licenses.
>>
>> =======
>>
>> If you were to tell us what types of servers (ie what applications) you
>> were considering, we might be able to give more specific advice.
>>
>> IME - Linux screws up in less bizarre ways on the whole that some other
>> OSes and is almost always fixable.
>>
>> Cheers
>>
>> Tim
>>
>> --
>> Tim Watts
> 
> I am interested in KVM virtualization, but beyond that mostly basic
> small office usage (file/print server, dns, dhcp, etc). Maybe some
> simple web/db stuff (wordpress, etc).

KVM is pretty easy to use. I'm using Scientific Linux 6 on my servers and 
KVM VMs for both Windows and Linux. It's trivial to create a VM using the 
virt-manager. After you've created your base VMs you can clone them by 
simply making copies of the virtual disk files. With a Linux VM all you 
have to do is reconfigure the networking for each clone and you're done. 
For a Windows VM you will have to patch the registration number to create 
multiple Windows VMs that can run simultaneously (it's exactly the same 
process as if you were and OEM cloning Windows disks). To back up a VM 
just make copies of your working virtual disks. I use SAMBA and NFS for 
all of my user space on the VMs, that way backups can be done on the 
native Linux systems.

The downside of KVM is that the virtual IO is pretty slow. For CPU 
intensive programs this isn't a problem but of IO intensive programs 
you'll notice it. VMware has much better IO performance but it's not free 
like KVM.

Back to comp.os.linux.misc | Previous | Next — Previous in thread | Next in thread | Find similar | Unroll thread

Thread

Best practice Linux support vendors? snorble <snorble@hotmail.com> - 2011-07-13 19:12 -0700
  Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net> - 2011-07-14 08:36 +0100
    Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? snorble <snorble@hotmail.com> - 2011-07-15 10:17 -0700
      Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2011-07-15 18:35 +0100
      Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> - 2011-07-15 20:09 +0000
        Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net> - 2011-07-16 07:49 +0100
          Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? General Schvantzkoph <schvantzkoph@yahoo.com> - 2011-07-16 13:40 +0000
            Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net> - 2011-07-16 18:19 +0100
              Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Aragorn <stryder@telenet.be.invalid> - 2011-07-17 03:44 +0200
  Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? aw@anhrefn.saar.de - 2011-07-14 15:25 +0200
    Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? notbob <notbob@notbob.invalid> - 2011-07-14 14:13 +0000
    Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid> - 2011-07-14 19:01 +0100
  Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? ray <ray@zianet.com> - 2011-07-14 14:51 +0000
  Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? JeffM <jeffm_@email.com> - 2011-07-14 14:34 -0700
    Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? John Hasler <jhasler@newsguy.com> - 2011-07-14 17:32 -0500
      Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net> - 2011-07-15 06:59 +0100
    Re: Best practice Linux support vendors? Tim Watts <tw@dionic.net> - 2011-07-15 06:57 +0100

csiph-web