on 12/6/2007 3:25 PM Lopez, Denise spake the following:
Hi all,
I would like to first preface this e-mail by saying if this topic has been covered already, could someone point me to the month of the discussion and I will gladly read it.
We have been using RHEL 3 / 4 in our environment and I am very happy and satisfied with the stability of the OS. Now with the new technologies incorporated into RHEL5, specifically Virtualization, Clustering, and Storage, and the costs associated with them, I was wondering how similar CentOS and RHEL 5 were.
It is my understanding that CentOS is RHEL 5 with the RedHat icons removed but the functionality of the packages is the same. In addition, updates may come a day or two later than RHEL 5.
My boss is a little concerned about the differences since we host production servers that require minimal downtime.
Any thoughts and opinions are very welcome.
The choice comes down to this; If you require to have a support contract, and a live person on the other end of the telephone when you have problems -- Use RedHat's offering and pay the support.
If you are willing to test things on non-production servers, and use public resources to work through problems -- Use CentOS. The money you save on support costs will more than offset the cost of a few test systems to run updates through.
CentOS uses the same system and source files that RHEL uses, and it is probably the distribution that is closest to the RHEL offering -- sometimes too close, because if it is broken on RedHat, it will probably be broken on CentOS also. The CentOS maintainers also have had success finding bugs and proposing fixes to the RHEL bug system, which benefits all.
There are many commercial ventures running on CentOS and other similar works.