Even at the enterprise server level, there are wide differences between Linux distributions, not only in price, but in ease of installation, included features and software, and particularly in ease of administration. See how the two most popular Linux enterprise server distributions match up.
Red Hat ES 3.0 vs. SuSE Server 8.0: Battle for the Enterprise
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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One thing I’m surprised I’ve never seen in reviews or on the net is the missing packages in the enterprise offerings. Ever noticed there is no sendmail-devel package? If you want it you have to get the src.rpm and build that, then install the -devel package for sendmail. Through the course of testing I’ve found many more devel packages that are missing as and at one point I found that I couldn’t even build a source rpm because of a cross dependency.
I fully agree with the reviewer here that if I’m paying $350+ for Linux distro there needs to be some kind of added value. I’m fine with downloading a free version and taking the time to manually setup certain aspects of the system but if I’m paying that kind of cash I expect things to work, be easily configured using a UI other than vi.
Was it just me or was he a bit biased? Specifically…
1) He seemed to have been nitpicking at some fairly small stuff at the RH install (one of the defaults is not the way he likes it) and while Suse didn’t even get grub working properly he completly glazed over that.
2) He seemed to have missed RH’s whole point with Fedora. They want to promote a completly free alternative for RH where RHEL is almost the exact same product but with a much longer time for updates, and you get support. This is what they say officially on thier website, and taking fedora as anything else and then complaining why it isn’t that isn’t fair. If you don’t need those things, then enterprise redhat isn’t for you.
(For example, I could just as easily complain about Suse not offering iso’s for thier products, or not offering those things like the web offering configuration for the non-enterprise distribution)
It also didn’t seem like he did a properly indepth review, I mean he didn’t even really compare Yast to redhat-config-‘s.
1) He seemed to have been nitpicking at some fairly small stuff at the RH install (one of the defaults is not the way he likes it) and while Suse didn’t even get grub working properly he completly glazed over that.
He specifically stated that the problem could nto be reproduced. Hence it was a non-issue
2) some of the value added function, specifcally those the user pointed out ARE NOT included in any free or downloadable format, whereas all of the “added” functions in RH can be dled and patched or installed into Fedora. And Network installs are available for SUSE.
And as for the YAST commend, I think most would agree, there is NO COMPARISOn between yast and redhats-config tools, most redhat-config seem to be an afterthought at best, and are few an far between..Check out the latest yast offering in SUSE 9.1 or SLES9, redhats config tools are severly lacking.
No disrespect intended, but i think, you, have missed the point of the article, and that was to basically determine just whether the added value in the product justifies the added cost over the free version. And his conclusion is that the “add-value” in SUSE does more to justify cost over workstation builds, than does REL over Fedora.
Hi
“And his conclusion is that the “add-value” in SUSE does more to justify cost over workstation builds, than does REL over Fedora.”
he basically outright said that there was no benefit over that of fedora in using RHEL which is not true and biased. longer release cycles are important to many people. more tested software with less updates and longer supported contracts are important too.
Thanks Eugenia for linking us to the article. I agree with the writer since I myself have seen major differances in what is offered in SuSE compared to RedHat. RedHat has dominated the market for film studios over the years though that may change soon. With the increase in interest for SuSE in North America partly due to Novell’s purchase RedHat has something to worry about. SuSE offers not only more included tools/software in a commercial package but also makes Linux easier to use compared to RedHat. When comparing prices of each commercial version I scratch my head wondering what RedHat is thinking. I used to think RedHat was the best distro out there until I tried SuSE. Even the free SuSE version is much more fun to use when compared to Fedora and no one should be able to deny that.
If RedHat doesn’t rethink their product designs and marketing/cost then they will end up taking a back seat to Novell’s SuSE. For now I would much rather play with my Gecko than wear a red hat.
Sorry forgot to include my username in the post
I totally agree with you. If you spend such amount of money, which distribution will let you do your job easier and faster?
For ease of use in a small biz environment, you can’t go wrong with SuSE. I actually tested 4 different products, SELS, RHES (using Lineox since RH does not offer free eval), Engarde Secure Professional and Windows 2003. As far as pricing, features and ease-of-use, SuSE wins for my set up.
Did he know about ‘custom’ install where you don’t have to let it auto partition? You can partition yourself and he appeared to list that as one of th 3 things to fix.
He should have also mentioned the provisioning module by Red Hat if he finds server management across systems a problem.
GUI, priority notification, errata information, Red Hat Package Module (RPM) dependency checking software, and auto update. The management module provides system grouping and role-based administration of policies, permissions, and scheduled actions.
All sizzle, no steak! He didn’t even mention that RHEL will have patches until 2008, he didn’t do any benchmarks, I don’t recall him even mentioning the versions of important server packages! The only info I gleaned from this entire article is that SuSE provides more web-based GUI config tools out of the box. Not only that, it looked suspiciously similar to webmin, which is available for almost every OS ever produced. (Including RHEL.)
GUI tools are nice, but they are of little to no consequence when deciding what OS to deploy as an enterprise server!
Not to nitpick, but when is everyone going to stop calling it SuSE or SuSe and use the correct form: SUSE? It’s much easier to type since you don’t have to go back and forth between upper and lower case and it’s also the correct way to spell it.
Other than that detail, I though the article was great and I think more people need to be educated that Red Hat isn’t the best thing out there. But where is the side by side comparison of SUSE and JDS? What does Sun offer in the way of value-add for the desktop that makes it more explensive than SUSE Pro?
LOL I was thinking the same thing, this is “enterprise” Red Hat has some of the best kernel hackers in the business and RHEL 3 was a quantum leap forward in server features, scalability, etc and not even a mention of it, strange.
The reason you do not have devel packages installed is that you should not be compiling your own software. You install what you are given in the supported configuration. Otherwise you have a support nightmare. If you want the devel packages, download the src.rpms and compile. I mean, the srpms are provided so what is the big deal.
He complains about missing packages. He complains about the lack of admin tools, when there are there. He somehow does not know about runlevel editor. He goes and blasts Redhat for not giving him what he knows would not be there. If ext3 is good enough, why should Redhat give themslves the burden of unnecesarily suporting 2 filesystems when they could just support one very well.
I mean, this guy thinks he can run a proper procduction server of Fedora Core, an unsupported distro. Good luck to him I say.
I am running it. Yea, it is expensive, but I have 4 hour 24×7 support on a dual Itanium 2 box that contains a whole slew of important legal data. Very much worth it.
By the way, when you actually pay for Red Hat support you do get extra supported packages that do not ship with the CDs. And – the support is excellent and long-lasting.
Red Hat, SUSE – it is all a Linux kernel with the GNU tools which is a hell of a lot better than most Unix. up2date kills ANY proprietary Unix update system out there.
Who is Red Hat to tell me what I should do with my server? If I’m using my machine for development and I don’t have some devel packages what good is it? Why do they give me some devel packages but not others? Why not just take them all out? If I don’t have any devel packages then why give me a compiler either? you should not be compiling your own software is simply unacceptable
The support argument is lame. If I know enough to compile an app I probably know where I got it from and who should be helping me with the any installation issues I come across.
Also, compiling from srpm is a big deal. Why should I go through that hassle? Red Hat generates their RPM packages somehow and I bet it’s from their own srpms. It’s actual work for them to pick ‘n choose which devel RPMs they don’t want to include.
Lastly, the administration tools in Redhat need serious work. They’re selling me something called Enterprise Linux yet their samba config tool barely lets me setup something worthy of home use?
Hi
”
Also, compiling from srpm is a big deal. Why should I go through that hassle? Red Hat generates their RPM packages somehow and I bet it’s from their own srpms. It’s actual work for them to pick ‘n choose which devel RPMs they don’t want to include. ”
rpm -ivh packagename
rpm -ba spec file
no big deal
Wow, I wonder any user who posted comment (except Chris who uses RHAS) has actually installed and tested both products? The article is a bit misleading at the part who will be using/deploying it. If you run data center then I have no comments since I don’t have that experience. But if you just need a server suite that will do normal tasks, such as, set up dns/mail/web/proxy. Sharing your files/printers and authentication with windows/linux users. Using VPN to access company network then SuSE wins as far as ease-of-use. RHEL provides *no* tools for you to configure VPN access, nor how do you want to treat spam, nor does it even support DynDNS which is very important for those countries/companies that still have dyn IPs from ISP.
I know this is not hard to set up but the point is when you spend $$$ and it’s not making your job easier then what’s the point? If you want to see it for yourself, go to Novell web site and download the eval version. Good luck with RedHat if you could get an eval. I installed Lineox which they claimed based on RHAS3.0 just to see what *should be* RHES provides.
caos
taolinux
whitebox linux
and so on
Zeke,
Sorry if my typo offended you guy
It’s been difficult to switch since I got used to the way it was typed before. If you look in the docs for version 9.0 you will see it typed SuSE not SUSE. Though after reading over the USA home site ( http://www.suse.com/us/index.html ) I noticed that they have since changed all the type font for the distro to “SUSE LINUX”. Even the wording under the Gecko logo states “SUSE a Novell company”.
I am running Tao Linux on my personal workstation (with garnome for desktop, killer setup). Tao Linux is a rebuild of RHEL, and I am only using the RHEL packages, not the Tao Linux contrib. Whenever I look for a -devel package (and it’s frequent), it’s there. That may be because the SRPM generates it, and Tao Linux ships it for free, but I at least have sendmail-devel.
I recommend everyone giving Tao Linux a try, it gives you a really stable base to use. I will be deploying it on the mail server at work later this summer.
FWIW I use RedHat Enterprise Server on 3 machines.
Actually, it’s even easier than rpm -ivh packagename && rpm -ba specfile
rpmbuild –rebuild package.src.rpm
Try adding mcrypt support to their php using this method.
If you need a customized install, then edit the spec file, add a –enable-mcrypt (or whatever), and rpm -ba specfile.
That happens to all binary distributions, and it would probably be an unsupported (from Red Hat) extension.
Not so long ago, a boxed set of RedHat was available for less than 100 $, which included a fairly comprehensive manual. How come the enterprise version contains only a pamphlet instead of a book, considering that it’s much more expensive ?
I think you should not criticise people writing SuSE, especially German users who know SuSE/SUSE since their founding. SuSE is in fact an abbreviation of the middle 4 words of:
Gesellschaft für Software- und System-Entwicklung mbH
See http://www.suse.de/de/company/suse/suse/factsheet.html . 1997 the writing changed after introducing an holding company named SUSE, but not immediate, as they kept using SuSE (at least within Germany) for several years. Most user from Germany would probably still write SuSE, as SUSE is not even a natural way to abbreviate in German.
Just by logical reasoning:
Because they probably think that documentation is not important for enterprise deployment of Linux (versus the SuSE tradition of user valueing the (consumer) SuSE Linux manual).
Not to nitpick, but when is everyone going to stop calling it SuSE or SuSe and use the correct form: SUSE? It’s much easier to type since you don’t have to go back and forth between upper and lower case and it’s also the correct way to spell it.
Not to nitpick? No, this is nitpicking. Besides, who are you to tell me what’s easier to type? And more importantly, why would you care.
It used to be SuSE. I will continue to call it SuSE as long as SuSE exists because SuSE has always been called SuSE and I will always type it like that.
Get the SuSE over yourself.
Look at IPSec tab in the network configuration for VPN.
I saw he had some strange problems with suse, so have I pro 9. if I choose same system to install on the same computer/hardware- it ends up in different results- and yes other linux disto`s don`t have this problem- the things that happen are: eth0 not working somethimes,sound etc- so no big deal- just a home computer- but SUSE how about beta releases????? I`ll bet 100$ that Mandrake will be better in terms of bugs than suse 9.1
The reviewer proves that he has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about when he claims RHN is functionally equivalent to apt. That’s an absolute joke. RHN lets you remotely administrate servers via the web, which is _damned handy_ if there’s a serious security update that needs to be applied when you’re not at the office.
I got the very distinct impression that he simply loaded these things on his computer and then took a look around. He didn’t see how the commercial support worked, nor did he actually see how these things scaled on a server level.
In other words, the review of RHAS was pretty bad, because all he did was look at it like his Fedora box. Of course he never saw any of the value-added features, because HE NEVER BOTHERED TO LOOK AT THEM.
-Erwos
It is SuSE as long as SuSE does use this type of writing themselves — and they do. They did in in 9.0 and continue to do so in 9.1. I can not find a single spot where they did not put “SuSE” in 9.1 except for the printing in white on the box. It’s everywhere: Upon booting, on the desktop, in Yast…
Basically, they use *BOTH* versions, therefore, both writings are correct.
Oh my god! I sure hope Riker (or do you write him RIKER now?) pulls a fast manoever out of his saxophone or the red-hatted Romulans will claim the Enterprise as theirs. And we can’t have that, can we?
Thankfully he knows where he stored the handbooks and can manage the Enterprise from a single console instead of having every console somewhere else like the Romulans have it (they have had a problem with trust anyway). On the other hand, the Romulans have more ships (some rebuilt from the junk of their vanilla ships but without artificial black hole in their core), though their loyality is sometimes questionable.
Personally I’de say he’s right about YAST, it’s expecially good to use over ssh, as far as I know RH’s config tools are GUI only, and I’ve never understood the point of having X running on a server, so for me they’re practically useless. The web based control is also very good, although webmin offers much of the same (without the ease of use implemented by SUSE).
The company previously headquartered in Germany had it’s distro name changed from “SuSE” to “SUSE LINUX” after being purchased by Novell. Novell includes the extension Enterprise Server, Desktop, Personal, Professional, etc depending on what distro version you use (ie: SUSE LINUX Professional 9.1). If you look through the press releases at the main site all wording relating to the distro is continually typed as “SUSE LINUX”. Even when refering to the International Headquarters in Germany it’s typed as “SUSE LINUX AG”. Editors should correct such errors in articles submitted by writers. See link here for corporate info http://www.suse.com/us/company/suse/suse/portrait.html
I really liked this review because the writer has real-world experience running actual production servers for clients, and he comes to actual conclusions. That’s a change from too many wishy-washy Linux reviews, which seem to be written by the sort of people who install a different “distro” every week just for the fun of it and review it a week later.
Thus the focus on remote-administration tools and the “added value” they bring … this is what matters to people who have to remotely manage dozens of servers. Whether your clients are paying you by the hour or not, every extra hour you spend noodling is one you either have to defend to the client or eat the cost. A $1000 product that saves you one hour a week for a year just paid for itself four times over.
I’m glad this review didn’t waste time on install tools, benchmarking or reviewing package choices.
Install tools are nice, but once a system is running, it’s running. This article I think even spent too much time on installation.
And kernel benchmarking? Sure it has its place, but SuSE 8 and RHEL are general-purpose SMB server products, and there’s little point in benchmarking or performance-tweaking a file/mail/directory server OS. A production web server would be different.
And listing software packages … I get tired of reviews that just list which versions of which packages, or that go on and on about why Mandrake only has Gnome 2.4 or whatever. It’s not like it’s that hard to make an RPM for a specific version of something … for instance a lot of people using Debian-stable as a file server are using the latest Samba 3. That doesn’t mean Samba 3 should be part of Debian-stable.
Finally, it’s awesome that this review didn’t mention KDE or Gnome even once. It’s a server, we don’t care.
S.u.S.E. or SuSE or SUSE or Suse or suse who cares? 😉
Maann, some of you guys are always good for a laugh, and yes I have installed and tested ALL major offerings from both SUSE and Redhat…FTR