Matt Morgan wrote:
> I'm a fairly experienced RH and Fedora user and admin looking to try
> CentOS for the first time. I have lots of experience with Dell servers
> and I'd like to stick with them.
Ok, though there are some other OEM and tier-* folks who might be able
to get you good hardware.
> Although I'm sure it's not always strictly enforced, Dell claims that
> it won't provide warranty hardware support on servers installed with
> an un-Dell-supported OS (basically, anything other Windows, RH, and
> Suse).
Yup. Thats the way they play.
We have to be able to support anything our customers run on, so we have
quite a few OSes going. We run our main servers on Centos, and our
test/development stuff has a rather interesting multiboot environment.
> Are other CentOS admins successful in getting Dell to support
> their hardware? How does it work--do you just tell them it's RH?
You might not like this, but you start looking outside Dell for hardware
or hardware support.
> Also, any recommendations for which Dell PERC or Dell SATA RAID
> adapters can I expect to work nicely with CentOS?
Well, I can tell you which SATA RAID works well in our experience under
Centos, and what is a big stinking pile of bits. Our list isn't
comprehensive (rather short). Whether or not Dell supports either of
them is another story.
If you want to stick with Dell, you effectively negate any choices you
may have for doing things in a non-Dell way. This is the case with most
of the large vendors. That means, Dell approved stuff throughout the
system. HP used to do this with their laptops. As soon as you plugged
in a non-HP PCMCIA card, you could kiss support goodbye.
This has more to do with how Dell and others want to drive the cost of
support (comes right off their bottom line) down by minimizing
variables, as compared to what actually will or will not work, and
working to support their customers doing things outside the "norm" or in
this case, outside the Dell way. Not that there is anything wrong with
Dell, just that they have to make choices about which business they are
in and how they are going to go to market with support.
If you don't like their choices, you can complain to them, or vote with
your wallet. If you stick with them, and you want support, you need to
follow their rules.
> If, on the other hand, Dell gives you trouble for CentOS installs, and
> you have recommendations for other server vendors, let me know. In
> particular, one that can provide on-site warranty support in Toronto,
> Canada, would be great. I'm only interested in i386 architecture, by
> the way.
If you include AMD64/x86_64 in that group, have a good look at the Sun
machines (v20z, x4100, x2100). Their support is pretty good. We use
their gear for some of the clusters we build for customers who need high
levels of hardware support, or short downtimes in the event of a failure.
--
Joe Landman
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
web : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
