Red Hat’s CentOS “acquisition” good for both sides, but ‘ware the Jabberwock

Red Hat’s CentOS “acquisition” good for both sides, but ‘ware the Jabberwock(redmonk.com)

31 points by dsberkholz 12 years ago | 20 comments

epoelke 12 years ago |

I see this as a good thing. Seems to me that we are basically getting back RedHat releases pre-RHEL. Fedora is great for the desktop, but I really like "Enterprise Linux" on the server side. I basically abandoned RedHat after the RHEL/Fedora split. Went to Gentoo (to unstable at the time) for a bit, Ubuntu, then CentOS during the late 4.x releases. I will pretty much stick with CentOS from here on out, why? Well enterprise customers who what support can get it, people who don't can easily use it, and those that don't want to pay now but know they will need to later will have an easy path forward. And its nice to have a major release that will remain stable and patched for a 7 year haul. Some folks seem to be concerned like this is a bad thing, RedHat has been a model citizen for open source. The amount of work they do in backporting fixes for people who need to remain on a version for whatever reason is huge. On top of the fact that they make most (all?) of their own software freely available as well. There is really no advantage for them to do anything to CentOS other than keep it doing what its doing, but faster.

garretraziel 12 years ago |

To those wondering, I think that Red Hat doesn't make that much money from SELLING RHEL. It's the support, certifications and those things that are making Red Hat's budget. So CentOS and RHEL aren't really competing products. But Red Hat can now offer support even to CentOS customers.

(I'm Red Hat employee.)

dijit 12 years ago | |

I love you.

just... throwing that out there.

schnevets 12 years ago |

I don't see why so many people think this deal is such a head scratcher. Red Hat is shifting away from pure support to a suite of cloud services. People are more likely to choose them if they are already using a Red Hat platform. This is especially useful if you're obliged to maintain a free version.

The moment you enter the blade business, you stop caring if someone is giving away your razors.

lsc 12 years ago |

I wonder what this is going to do to the Centos-Xen[1] project?

[1]http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2013/06/20/welcome-to-the-xen4...

cwyers 12 years ago | |

RHEL specifically mentioned it in the FAQ:

http://community.redhat.com/centos-faq/#_what_this_means_for...

"The CentOS Project will expand its mission to provide additional open source technology-specific variant editions of the core operating system. Such editions will be capable of serving as a foundation for multiple, complementary cloud/virtualization projects. A current example is the Xen4CentOS project, which provides the components required to use CentOS 6 as a Xen host. Future examples will likely include variants to provide the virtualization component needs for OpenStack and oVirt, and variants providing hardware support and component updates for web hosters."

So they're publicly committing to continue to support that.

lsc 12 years ago | | |

ah. thanks. I missed that.

mwcampbell 12 years ago | |

A bit tangential, but what do you think of KVM? That seems to be the option that the distros are backing most strongly.

lsc 12 years ago | | |

meh. From what I've seen it looks way better for "spin up a vm every now and then to test something" - But that's not what I do. My hosts run virtuals, and only run virtuals. But eh. I know many people who are obviously way smarter than I am telling me that KVM is the way to go. (I'm actually setting up a new KVM system for my old formerly known as tile networks customers this weekend. we will see)

I also have some (perhaps irrational? I have yet to test) fears about KVM's superior ram over-subscription mechanisms. That's the thing. Having poor over-subscription mechanisms is a honest signal to the customer that you aren't oversubscribing.

KVM systems can actually hand out host swap to the guests as if it were ram[1]. In a multi-tenant 'race to the bottom' kind of environment? Well, it hasn't happened yet, but I think it's quite possible that we will see KVM go the way of OpenVZ when it comes to multi-tenant setups, simply 'cause I could sell 144 gigabytes of ram on my servers with only 72 gigabytes of real ram. Aside from performance, I don't think customers would be able to tell. If I were to do that in Xen, it would be pretty goddamn obvious (I'd have to add the swap within the guest, so you could see how much swap you were actually using, then you'd have a 'balloon' driver eating up the ram that I said I gave you that you don't have.)

To be clear, feeding guests swap as ram is the most clumsy method of memory over-subscription. KVM has some super-slick methods... some of which are partly supported by later versions of Xen. Tmem actually can gain some benefits from oversubscription without any downside; e.g. deduping memory pages and using the leftovers for read-cache, that can be grabbed back by the guest. - but that isn't going to make the guest look like it has more ram, that's just going to make disk I/O slightly better.

[1]https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_E...

oakwhiz 12 years ago |

On one hand, this might actually improve the state of CentOS. But on the other hand, it's a bit of a conflict of interest for Red Hat to be maintaining the free (as in freedom) version. The real question is, how compatible is the freemium (as in beer) business model with open-source interests?