[CentOS-devel] First round of RHEL programs announced

On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 3:55 PM Gena Makhomed <gmm at csdoc.com> wrote:
>
> On 28.01.2021 14:54, Neal Gompa wrote:
>
> > On Thu, Jan 28, 2021 at 6:22 AM Gena Makhomed <gmm at csdoc.com> wrote:
>
> >> What is about running in the one bare metal RHEL server virtual machines
> >> with different subscription owners? For example, run in production on
> >> one bare metal server 16 VMs with subscription owner Alice, and 16 VMs
> >> with subscription owner Bob, and 16 VMs with subscription owner Carl,
> >> and so on. Are such configurations legal and allowed or not? I didn't
> >> find any limitations on the blog article, but for sure and for future I
> >> need a clean and unambiguous answer from Red Hat.
> >>
> >> If such configurations are allowed - this is a legal workaround for a
> >> limit of 16 no-cont RHEL instances. For example, a small company, with
> >> 50 employees can absolutely legally have free and no-cost 800 RHEL
> >> servers in self-support mode. Company with 100 employees can have 1600
> >> free no-cost RHEL servers in self-support mode and so on.
> >>
> >> If such configurations are forbidden (on what basis?) - I have no choice
> >> but to migrate from free CentOS and no-cost RHEL to Oracle Linux or Alma
> >> Linux or Rocky Linux.
> >>
> >> And in the future if my company grows and I will need to buy commercial
> >> support - I will be forced by Red Hat's decision to buy subscriptions
> >> for Oracle Linux from the Oracle Corporation?
> >>
> >> Is this the real goal of the no-cost RHEL 16 instance limit - force
> >> CentOS users migrate to Oracle Linux?
>
> > Brian Exelbierd explained this whole thing quite well on the Ask Noah
> > Show[1]. The answer to this is that what you're saying is perfectly
> > allowed. The bet here is that this is sufficiently costly, risky, and
> > a hassle (who wants to manage 100+ Red Hat accounts? I know I wouldn't!)
> > that the company in question would decide to purchase RHEL
> > subscriptions from Red Hat, especially after experiencing the value
> > that Red Hat provides (Red Hat Insights, live kernel patching, etc.).
>
> But did you know the minimal price of one RHEL Server subscription?
>
> ~ 350 USD/year.
>
> So, subscription for 100 servers/VMs will be cost 35_000 USD/year.
>
> Every year. For 10 years price of 100 subscriptions is 350_000 USD.
>
> You don't need 100 Red Hat accounts, for 100 server subscriptions.
>
> For 112 RHEL Server subscriptions you need only 7 Red Hat accounts.
>
> 16 * 7 == 112.
>
> Managing 7 Red Hat accounts really is sufficiently costly, risky,
> and a hassle? I don't see any problems with such work for 7 accounts.
>
> For 1600 servers minimal commercial price is 560_000 USD/year.
> and price is 5_600_000 USD for 10 year subscription. For 1600 servers.
>
> Managing 100 Red Hat accounts really is sufficiently costly, risky,
> and a hassle? This work cost more then 5_600_000 USD for 10 years?
>

It can be quite a hassle, especially if they have to be keyed to
individual accounts and automation and such can only provision from
one set of credentials at a time. At larger scale setups, it becomes
quite messy and involved to actually maintain that.

>From experience, I can already say it's a pain to manage *one* Red Hat
account, much less 7 or 100. It's not just the money, it's the labor
and the opportunity costs.

> I don’t understand one thing, if it is so easy to get workaround
> these restrictions of 16 no-cost RHEL instances and at the same time
> bypassing these restrictions is completely legal - why were these
> restrictions introduced at all?
>
> So that CentOS users should think about whether they should
> switch to no-cost RHEL, or maybe they should think about switching
> to completely free variant of Enterprise Linux from Oracle, which
> does not have such restrictions on the number of no-cost instances
> and don't need any subscriptions for seamless work at all?
>
> As previously CentOS Linux users live (mostly) without commercial
> subscription and support from RHEL, the same in the future,
> they can live with no-cost Oracle Linux (mostly) without
> commercial subscription.
>
> If user of mass installation of Oracle Linux in future need commercial
> support - he/she will buy commercial support from Oracle Corporation,
> not from Red Hat/IBM. It's obvious, isn't it? Money will go to Oracle.
>
> This is some kind of strange situation when the Enterprise Linux
> was created by Red Hat staff and Fedora community, but the Oracle
> Corporation will make additional money on it, because this is where
> a large number of CentOS users can/will go in current situation.
>
> > What I would have liked to see is the addition of some generic
> > low-cost subscription options that would be sufficiently below the
> > floor to fit with even low-margin businesses so that as a business
> > grows from 16, to 50, to 100, to 1000, and so on, the company would
> > continue to use RHEL and continue to support the awesome work Red Hat
> > does. Right now, the current pricing is so unbelievably expensive that
> > I would instead just convert the boxes from RHEL to CentOS Stream
> > after a certain threshold.
>
> CentOS Stream is just a beta-version for next minor RHEL release.
>
> CentOS Stream is not ready for production, see for example,
> bugreport https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1913806
> - this bug is present in CentOS Stream 8, but absent in CentOS 8.3.
>

Meh. Legacy CentOS Linux gets serious bugs all the time too. I had
dozens of AMD servers that wouldn't boot because of a critical bug
introduced in CentOS 7.3. There was a whole cycle where I had to hold
back kernels because they couldn't release a fix until CentOS 7.4
arrived.

At least with CentOS Stream, when the fix is made, I'll get it right
away. That's better than before.

> > I firmly believe that low-cost self-support options would be a good
> > value for Red Hat to offer to the market, especially for a lot of
> > those startups that eventually grow past the 16 server limit. I hope
> > that's on the docket based on the comment at the top of the RHEL blog
> > post that this is the first of many new programs.
>
> I hope so too, because if they do nothing, then many CentOS users will
> simply leave for Oracle Linux. I just don't see any other way out now.
>

I'm optimistic. I know the folks at Red Hat are doing their best, and
I have faith in them.




--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!