[rt-users] Advice for New Machine

[Joop van de Wege]

Ken Crocker wrote:
> John,
> 
> 
>     We are currently running 3.6.4, but DESPERATELY want to upgrade to 
> 3.8.2. Hence the desire to get this new zone set up right FIRST, before 
> trying to upgrade. We are an Oracle house, so that's not on the table. 
> So far, I'm leaning toward Linux, but I haven't heard from Jesse or 
> Ruslan, Stephen Turner, Joop, or Mike Peachy or any of the more 
> experienced players yet. I'm actually starting to get excited.
> 
Now I feel compelled to reply ;-)
We're an Oracle shop too and have a mixed environment of servers, 
Windows, Linux, Solaris (8 on sparc). Some of our customers do run 
Oracle on Windows, either virtualised or on real hardware, and recently 
we have gone Centos4(5) in a virtualised environment. Sofar we like it. 
Currently we're running our RT installation (3.8.2) on Ubuntu using 
Oracle XE but thats going to be migrated to Centos too. There is a known 
problem with Centos and RT but knowing it makes it no problem. Now we're 
a small shop probably compared to some of the people on this list, you 
included so I don't have to maintain 20+ servers with a small problem 
which then mostly becomes a BIG problem.

So if you have access to half a decent PC you could install VMware or 
VirtualBox or name you're favorite and play around with it. To give you 
some guidance about how long things take:
takes me about 30min to setup a centos4/5 server, mostly default 
settings, about 30-60min to setup Oracle 10g and probably about the same 
amount of time to install RT and thats mostly waiting for cpan to 
install things.
Now I have done this quite a few times so be prepared if you're really a 
noob on linux/solaris commandline stuff (that is DEFINITELY not meant to 
be negative to you)

So bottom line is I would go for Linux except when you need things 
unique to Solaris (zfs,dtrace,zones,??).
Ubuntu is bleeding edge, Centos is 'conservative', RH get you support 
(payed well probably), Suse ? (no experience, other then that its the 
basis of our virtualisation layer)

If you need more help, either virtual or real, just let me know,

Joop